The Home Cook

The Home Cook home page
Personalized Recommendations Survey
Resources & Tips page
Breakfast Recipes page
Lunch & Dinner Recipes page
Dessert Recipes page
EchoAR page

Topic: Education, Track: 2 - Traditional (made new project during hackathon) We have also entered in the EchoAR, Most Creative Hack, and Beginner Track.

Check out our website: https://thehomecook.glitch.me/

Here is our presentation: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1LAdgtUW8EoIvmEhcbVs_ujjDf_pHC7AkIeN-9MbRFHw/edit#slide=id.p

What is The Home Cook?

Our project is a website that aims to help home cooks develop their skills, regardless of skill level. We have four main features that work in unison to provide a friendly user interface and a good experience.

Our first feature is a survey that our users can take to receive personalized recommendations. We classify our recipes using three values. Diet: vegan, vegetarian, non-vegetarian; Allergies: soy, nuts, none; Cooking Skill Level: advanced, intermediate, beginner; Meal: breakfast, lunch, dinner.

The computer then uses all these values as parameters to inform and redirect the user to their personalized recommended page. This makes our website convenient and efficient to browse through.

Our next feature is the recipes. We compiled recipes for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and dessert. These recipes are sorted into categories based on skill level and other food restrictions to allow for a simple search for the recipes. These categories include recipes for beginners, intermediate, and advanced bakers. Our recipes are also sorted into the categories, vegan, vegetarian, nut-free, and soy-free to accommodate a variety of users.

Another feature of our website is our resources and tips page. Here we have weekly tips that can enhance our user's cooking skills. For this week, we have a spread on knife skills as well as some general baking tips. This page discusses the proper knife grip, using a helping hand while cutting, as well as a demo video demonstrating this. We hope that these tips will come in handy when our users are cooking in the kitchen! There are also baking tips to help take their skills to the next level. We remind users about the simplest tips such as making sure you read the recipe beforehand, and more advanced tips such as not over-mixing and using correct measuring technique.

Another main feature is our EchoAR page, where users can scan these QR codes to see some common kitchen items such as a knife, blender, cutting board, toaster, oven, and stove in AR! It is important for cooks of any level to familiarize themselves with these items so that they know to use the proper gadgets when cooking so that their cooking process will go smoothly.

How we built The Home Cook

We mainly used HTML and CSS to create the website. For the survey, we also used JavaScript. To collaborate in real-time, we coded on the platform Glitch.

Challenges we faced

One big challenge we encountered and overcame was trying to get the recommendations for the user based on our survey. This was a big part of our app as we knew that recommendations would be such a useful feature for our users. With persistence, we were able to finally get it to work and this was a big accomplishment for us.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are so proud that we got past our challenges to create a nice website. One big challenge we overcame was trying to get the recommendations for the user based on our survey. This was a big accomplishment for us as we were finally able to get it to work with persistence.

We are also really proud of incorporating EchoAR. This was our first time using this platform and this was such a great learning experience and we can't wait to experiment more with EchoAR!

In addition, the drop-down recipe sorting also turned out to be such a nice addition to our app. We're also proud of how clean and aesthetically pleasing our website looks in general.

What's next for The Home Cook

In the future, we hope to add more recipes and festive categories to our website to create a larger database. We also hope to create games to enforce cooking vocabulary and tools to make our website interactive.