Posted by Andy B.
This week we presented our app at the Community Forum. The whole time, our stand was busy with 2-3 people. People were interested in our unique solution. We had a good experience talking with parents and teachers. Our presentation and speaking skills improved throughout and our presentation to the last person was better than the first person we talked to. What we presented was our poster talking about our problem, solution and next steps, A piece of paper of paper with a QR code so that people could scan and demo the app for themselves and lastly a computer that showed our app from a developers stand point and the program we used to build the app. We prepare by saying who would say what, but we also knew everything to say if there was more than one person or they came at a different time. I think we learned how to deal with multiple people, each coming in at different times. We figured out how to split up the work depending on how many people were at our booth. Posted by Ethan
After going through a lot of wrongs and a lot of rights we have come up with an app that is perfect. So our app focuses on helping people through any natural disaster. This app helps people obtain food and water in a bad situation of a natural disaster. We have gotten 7 such as Ralph’s, Whole Foods, and Vons. All these stores agreed that in an event of a natural disaster to help the people without food and water get food and water. When you get into our app there is an about page. This tells you exactly what our app does. Then the next page gets you onto a map of where all the stores that agreed to helping us are located. From this page you can know where you are and all the stores that are open will be ready to help you out. Since a lot of the times the roads would be damaged you would have to walk across instead of drive to the stores. This is why we chose stores in the L.A. area. This is because we focused on this area. Our third and last page on our app is the contact page. This page is where you can contact my whole group through email. You Will also be able to contact 911 just in case. In our data we had a small percentage of people who said that they wouldn’t use this app in a situation of a natural disaster. 48% of the people said maybe. I think if we were able to add you location to the app then maybe we would have ahead a higher percentage of people that would say yes. Posted by Andy B. We have made major leaps to our final solution. This week we meet with Jim Bologna Director of Technology, Co-Director of CTL, Dean of Science and Technology Outreach and teacher of App Design at Windward School. He explained to us how to work AppShed, the program we are using to build our app. As we see it now, our app will not be publish on the App Store or Google Play, but instead a website formatted for a phone that can have all the same amenity as a normal app. One problem that we has was that we weren’t getting enough stores on board with our idea. Our solution to this was to start calling food bank, places that already give free food to people on a daily basis. Most, of not all, said yes. This gave us more locations to add into our app. Another problem we ran into was that we envisioned having the stores be red when they are unwilling to give food or have ran out, green when they were willing to give and had supplies left, and orange when we were unsure. We quickly found out this was not possible using AppShed. We solved this by creating a google form that people could report the supply of food at a certain store and then we could manually remove the store from the app. We have figured out all of the main fixtures of the app and the main thing we will working on is making the app look better. Ethan working on the app Beginning stage of our app
Posted By: Amanda S.
Our day with the faculty went good. Most of the faults that were pointed out were easily solved through research and interviews. We found that we needed to modify how we were planning to get the food to people. Instead of having the companies trucks come and bring the food to the natural disaster victims, the victims can go to the store. We also found that we needed more stores to be able to help most/all the victims in L.A.. Our solution has overall stayed the same. Our group is making an app where supermarkets around the L.A. area agree to give food and water to victims of a natural disaster. People can use our app to look at a map, and see where the closest store to them is, that provides food and water free of charge to them. We also decided to use a live map, to help people know which stores they can go to, incase one or more of the stores runs out of food. We also decided to use notifications to tell someone that it is time to use the app. We found that 92% of L.A. carries phones with them, meaning that if there is a natural disaster, people can easily get the food and water that they need. This solution is easier than other solutions because it is more efficient, and it addresses/helps more people, instead of a small community. Posted by Andy B.
Since our last blog post we have narrowed our issue down to not having enough resources/ food and water, to survive after the Earthquake/Aftershock. Since the last week we have also gotten a couple stores to sponsor us with our idea. We have called multiple stores like Whole Foods, Ralphs, Bristol Farms, Vicente foods, and Vons. Of these stores two of them said they were able to help us with our idea. These two stores were Vons and Whole Foods. They said that they were going to help us by giving food and water. We asked them if they have ever helped in a situation like and earthquake and Vons said that a certain Vons helped with the wildfires that happened a couple months ago. This was the montecito Vons. We tried to get hold of them but they never really picked up. So that is what we did this week so far. Posted by Amanda S.
Since our last blog, we have made progress on focusing our problem and reaching out to people in the community affected by our problem. From earthquakes, we have focused the issue to the first response right after an earthquake and how it could be improved. From our research we have learned that firefighter, police office, and local medical organizations are the first to responder. Later on the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) can be requested by the state if the it is a major earthquake. Our goal is to improve the communication from victim to the correct first responder(firefighters, police, medical assistance) that can help them in the best way possible and help the first responders prioritize these requests based or severity. We reached out to a store owner in Napa County, Patricia Trimble, that had damage to her store in the 2014, 6.0 earthquake. She has responded to our email and agreed to an interview. We are hoping to get out of this interview how the first response was for her and how she thinks it could improve. As well as that we are going to contact local grocery store and see if they would be willing to provide food and water free of charge in the event of a earthquake that destroyed buildings in the area or if they are in the habit of donating food to food banks or homeless shelters. We hope to gauge the willingness of these stores to help the community. Posted by Andy
We are Amanda, Ethan, and Andy. Our theme is disasters, a very common natural disaster in California. We choose disasters because we wanted to be able to prepare everyone for the upcoming events. We decided to narrow down the subjects to earthquakes, and how we can help the people affected by the earthquakes. One of the big reasons we felt compelled to choose earthquakes as our topic, was because we live in Los Angeles, and we witness many earthquakes each day, and want to figure out a way to help them people like us, that are really affected by the impacts of earthquakes. We chose to go even deeper and get to what happens after the earthquake which is the aftershock. An aftershock is a hit that happens after the earthquake. This could cause all the buildings to fall down and break highways, and damage homes. We thought that this was the thing that people had to be careful about when an earthquake happens. People had to be protected by this and move away from this. We have begun doing preliminary research on earthquake and aftershocks. |
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