FoodCrowd: creating a new app

Creating a new app. (www.deftproject.org.uk)

We, the inter disciplinary DE:FT team of computer and social scientists are making steady progress with the three apps we have although GradeBack has now been replaced by FoodCrowd, an app which we are developing with help from Archbishop Sentamu School. One of the aims of the app is to provide a creative, innovative and educationally orientated digital tool which has been designed in conjunction with the revised National Curriculum in England for Design and Technology 2014, aimed at pupils at Key Stage 1 to 3. The programme of study puts more emphasis on seasonality and where and how a variety of ingredients are grown, reared, caught and processed. With this in mind we have been working on an app which aims to connect schoolchildren with the food they are growing in their school garden and the impact that the environment can have on the way the plants grow.

The images below are simulations of how we envisage the app working. Pupils will open up the app to add a new entry on a particular plant they are growing in the school garden.

In this way the app will allow pupils to monitor and record the growth of the plants they grow in their school garden.  They will be able to monitor weather conditions, temperature, speed of growth and yield to mention just a few of the parameters that are being incorporated.  Hopefully any produce they grow will be used to prepare themselves a hot meal, again one of the objectives of the programme of study at KS3.  Apart from becoming competent in a range of cooking techniques the data the pupils have collected will help them to understand the principles of nutrition and health as well as mapping across into other areas of the National Curriculum, such as Numeracy.  The image below illustrates how the app will have the functionality to create graphs based on the data pupils have collected.

What's 'appening' with DE:FT

By @deftfood

Progress so far 
Now that we are six months into the project we thought it was time we let you all know how things are progressing. We have prototypes of three apps - FoodCloud, ShopStamp and Gradeback - which are on our website www.deftproject.org.uk as power point slides.  For those who left comments on the forum page of the website, many thanks!  Any further comments would be most welcome too! We have also designed a questionnaire survey, https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/DDZWC9K which is looking at shopping habits and technology.  Again please feel free to complete it.  There is also the chance of winning some Amazon vouchers for those who do.

Following on from some of the feedback we have received we have slightly modified the FoodCloud prototype, removing the quiz and simplifying some of the links that we had built into it.  Just to recap, the idea behind FoodCloud was to develop an app which would show people how they were ‘surrounded by food’ so, for example, what was growing in the fields, how food was moving all around them, the routes it was taking and the outlets available to them.

Progress to date 
David Grey from Computer Science at the University of Hull is one of the co-investigators on the project and he has been busy turning our paper prototype of FoodCloud into a working app.  The app has, of all things, a ‘back end’, which can be found at http://foodcloud.deftproject.org.uk so please have a look at it and tell us what you think. The link will take you straight to the log in page and once logged in it is then possible to input descriptions of what the fields are used for using the fields tab.  David has built in a link to ‘MyFarm’ so that anyone who logs in as a farmer can locate their farm using the map which will be displayed, zoom into their fields and label them accordingly as well as providing a brief description of their farm and any farm gate sales they offer.  It’s amazing what a campus can be used for as in order to test how well the ‘back end’ works we have turned the Hull site into a virtual arable farm. The Cohen building was a field of wheat which has been harvested and will be made into biscuits.

Opening up the app 
This information is stored in the ‘back end’ of the app and when the app is opened up it uses GPS to locate any fields that have been added to the ‘back end’ data base.  

Image of smartphone screen and field ‘flags’

Once the fields are located a small ‘flag’ appears on the phone screen (see image above),and by touching the ‘flag’ labelled, wheat, for example, an image of a wheat plant will appear together with the information that was loaded onto the ‘back end’.  We now have a working prototype which is exciting which we can take out ‘into the wild’ and demonstrate to people something we have just started to do and if anyone else would like to see the app working please get in touch at Deborah.butler@hull.ac.uk.  Any feedback is invaluable and will help us in making the app more responsive to the needs of user groups.

Next steps.
At present we are in the process of trying to develop extra ‘layers’ to ‘FoodCloud’ so that it can be used to make the link between food and sites of historical interest. We have also been thinking about a broader ‘FoodCrowd’ concept which would involve children, for instance collecting and inputting data on their local area thus learning about their localities and how they are surrounded by food.