CookIt

Helping Students Learn Cooking Interactively

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Inspiration

Do you as a student know how to cook? Many students today find the transition to secondary school to university very difficult. Many people are moving away from the comfort of their homes to residents. However, not many of them know how to cook! These leads to students being forced to eat unhealthy foods, becoming obese and not knowing how to cook. CookIt allows students to connect and learn how to cook together. They can watch videos together and share recipes.

What it does

CookIt is a 1-to-1 video chat feature with WebRTC, Firestore, and JavaScript. CookIt is a web application where users can connect through a video call and learn how to cook together! They can share healthy recipes, give improvements to others, and learn how to cook together by uploading a video URL for both to follow. This allows students to learn, while maintaining a healthier lifestyle. "Providing for our customers to build of kit of recipes for university students. Connect with others to learn, cook, and exchange knowledge for the sustainability during university. Many students become obese and are forced to eat unhealthy foods without having any experience in cooking. We can change that."

How we built it

CookIt utilizes Node.js for the backend, HTML/CSS for the frontend, and Sendgrid Twilio API for emailing other users with the call ID so that they can join. We used Twilio by using their email API, Sendgrid, which gives us 100 emails a day. We connected our single sender and api key for an email to send emails to other users inputted. Firebase was used for video communication and connecting users to hear and see each other. Cockroach DB was used to store recipe video links. Github was used to communicate and transfer our code.

Challenges we ran into

Some challenges that we ran into was learning the new technologies. No one in our group knew how to use Cockroach DB and Twilio, but learned very quickly in order to implement some parts of it into our application. We tried to implement a machine learning model to track highly rated and healthy youtube recipe tutorials and add those links to the cockroachDB table database; however, due to time constraints, we could not make that implementation. Furthermore, some members had issues on Github, which led to some pieces of code being deleted. However, in the end, everyone learned how to use Github, heavily increasing our progress in finishing this project!

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of completing this project and implementing features such as video calls, video players, email senders, databases, and more! Even though it did not end up being everything that we thought, we implemented all of the key features. I hoping that this project can reach university students worldwide to help them learn how to cook and live a healthier lifestyle.

What we learned

We learned about many new technologies such as Firebase, Twilio, and Cockroach DB. We also learned that organization was key. Organization allowed us to finish this project by splitting this ambitious idea into parts that were able to be completed. We also learned that consistency and communication is very important. Everyone in the group was communicating constantly from 7am to 1am to work on this project. We were very transparent to each other and asked for help and telling what other activities we had that day.

What's next for CookIt

CookIt will be deployed using Domain.com and Netlify with our domain, CookIt.com. We are hoping to upgrade our Twilio Sengrid account to allow for more emails per day. We are also planning on upgrading our Cockroach DB database to allow more users to join. We are going to improve the frontend by utilizing React! We also plan to use a machine learning model to classify highly rated recipe videos to add those links to the cockroachDB so users can simply enter a recipe video into the search bar and watch it!

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