Inspiration
One member of our group had visited Chinatown previously and noticed how empty it was compared to how it is advertised. Restaurants were empty, and the businesses that attracted the most attention were clothing stores, bakeries, and cafes. We also realized that a culture’s food is one of the most important aspects of how it identifies itself, so we placed great importance on this and wanted to help Chinatown expand its culture through food.
What it does
Our app takes applications from small local businesses in Chinatown and posts them on our website, where larger established companies can review their statistics and choose which restaurant they want to mentor in expanding their business.
How we built it
We used Python, HTML, and CSS to build the website, and we used datasets to train the AI.
Challenges we ran into
We had to train our AI to process applications from businesses. We also faced issues with Vercel hosting. Additionally, we had a lot of ideation challenges, including deciding how to frame our solution. We generated many ideas on how to help, and narrowing it down to a concise problem and solution statement took some time due to the numerous possibilities this application could have.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are proud of creating a working demo of our application with example use cases and a working AI for the application form. We also built a functional sign-up database that stores information and can be used for future logins.
What we learned
We learned about Chinatown's culture and how much work is required to preserve this unique culture. We also learned a lot about Python syntax, and most people in our group had no prior knowledge of backend or frontend web development. By the end, almost the whole group had learned how to do full-stack development, and it’s reflected in our website.
What's next for M0S0
We want to implement this throughout Chinatown and initially manually contact larger businesses to get a kick-start and introduce our application to a broader audience. If the expansion is successful throughout Chinatown, we hope to allow high school start-ups and any business or company to easily publish and connect with established companies.
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