What track are you submitting this project to?
Health
Why Mindful Eating?
As college students and young adults, we are often tangled in crazily busy schedules, rushing from class to class, and attending endless networking and recruiting events. It is easy to ignore the most basic needs of our body — to eat well. Even when we have time at a dining table, we indulge in YouTube and TikTok videos, web browsing, or checking the stock market, and never pay much attention to eating itself. However, this may create problems like anorexia, bulimia, overeating (especially eating to fill emotional needs), and digestive disorders. Therefore, it is important to educate the public about the concept of “mindful eating”. It improves our mood by bringing our attention to experience with food and reminds us of eating as an activity that’s so essential to our well-being.
What it does?
Website is one of the informative media that people most frequently turn to. We made the website interactive so that people can learn about the concept and benefits of mindful eating and choose their preferred way to practice mindful eating, thereby personalizing their experiences and better incorporate mindful eating into their daily habits. (Even for just a few meals a month, one can find oneself attuned to their body.) At the same time, we did recognize that our users already have many daily commitments, so we abandoned a mandatory check-in format that may be potentially stress-inducing. Users can submit their contact information if they want to join the greater “ME-Mindful Eating” community to continue practicing and receiving future updates about social events (e.g. pair-and-share experience, cooking party, etc).
How we built it?
We used HTML and CSS to build the front-end of the website.
Challenges we ran into:
Lack of experience with HTML & CSS Use CSS to align text and images, & fit external images with different sizes on the webpage Use HTML to embed YouTube videos on our webpage Use buttons to direct to different sections of the webpage & buttons and hyperlinks overlap
Accomplishments that we're proud of:
We had zero experience with website building and design before. So we took a day to learn about HTML and CSS basics with Duke’s Programming Foundations with JavaScript, HTML, and CSS online course. Then we browsed numerous websites to extract patterns of website layout. While we were coding, we referred to w3schools.com to complement our knowledge and further improve the function and design of the website.
What we learned:
We learned about website layout and various functions (including forms for collecting user information, table, list, hyperlink). We also employed a user-oriented design principle by picking appropriate font size and color to make the website clear, concise, and user-friendly.
What's next for ME - Mindful Eating
We want to improve the subscription function so that users can get future updates automatically. We also want to add a function that matches readers’ profile with services providing counseling and behavioral therapies targeting symptoms of eating disorders. Overall, we want to increase the interactivity of this website to give users feedback in time.
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