We were faced with the challenge of college dropout rates.Students face many problems during higher education which leads many to dropout at one point or another. When examining the potential challenges students face, we came up with a few important questions to get us started:

○      How might we help college students transition into adulthood?

○      How might we help college students maintain a healthy school/work/life balance?

○      How might we change the way college students approach their finances?

After brainstorming a few ideas suchas budgeting and scheduling apps, we landed on a more unique approach: food.Regardless of who you are, food is a major part of our lives, and a majorchange that comes with college is how to feed yourself. Students often have dining halls and meal plans, but they are often expensive and lack variety. Andwhat about after college? Cooking is a life skill everyone should have, so we took the route of creating a grocery guide and meal planning app.

Learning to budget is also astruggle most college students have, so that had to be incorporated as well.This is where the inspiration for our app Zango came from. The app would allowthe user to set a weekly budget from groceries and input their food needs andpreferences. From there, Zango would generate grocery lists based on what isavailable in grocery stores nearby. Users can also input what they already have to the grocery list for Zango to then generate recipes with step-by-step guideson preparation and cooking. This app could prove useful to those new to budgeting and shopping for themselves, those wanting to learn to cook, eventhose who want to eat healthier or are recovering from eating disorders. By removing just a few stressors from a student’s life, their probability of dropping out may be greatly reduced.

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This project ended up being very demanding. We found many strengths in our design, as we did weaknesses. One of our main strengths was visual appeal; bright but not overly intense colors allow for an inviting UI without too much of a formal, corporate feel. The onboarding process is simple and the user is clearly guided through everything they need to do. The biggest strength however, is the potential for integration: web scraping grocery store websites, connecting to delivery services such as Insta cart or DoorDash, and more.

           However, that potential for integration brings up our design’s biggest weakness:actually implementing this integration. Getting access to delivery services and importing information would certainly take some work, as well as willing collaboration from tvces. Even more importantly, sourcing the recipes. A big issue is where to find these recipes, how to make or access a recipe database, paying for this data, and more. At this moment, AI is not necessarily advanced enough to reliably produce healthy, well-tasting recipes - especially not with being restricted to what the user has in their grocery list or pantry.

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