A small group of Coppell High School juniors gather around their laptops, typing away as they put the final touches on an extensive project months in the making.
However, these students are not working on any ordinary school project. Instead, they are preparing to send their group application to the United States Congress on Oct. 24, aiming to win one of the nation’s most prestigious student coding competitions.
In the Congressional App Challenge, students are tasked with creating and submitting their original apps for a chance of winning the CAC in their congressional district.
This year, Coppell High School juniors Aryaman Singh, Anmol Deepak, Samarth Prasad and Samanyu Hebbar, submitted their new app: Project Ambrosia.
Project Ambrosia is an app designed to combat users’ unhealthy diets, and help them make better, healthier choices.
“Obesity is a major problem around the world, especially in developed countries like the United States,” Singh said. “With more consciousness of what people can eat, I think we can actually help solve that problem to some extent.”
Ambrosia accomplishes healthier eating habits by informing users of whether a food is healthy or not, powering their suggestions with Gemini, an artificial intelligence tool from Google.
When a user searches for a specific food, the app sends a request to an application programming interface database, returning values for protein, added sugars, calories, grams of total fat, cholesterol and sodium. Based on this information, Gemini provides an overview of the healthiness of the food, categorizing it as healthy, unhealthy, or somewhere in between.
The idea for Ambrosia stems from the complexity of nutritional labels, which can be difficult to read and interpret.
“A lot of the information on nutrition labels is unreadable to the average person,” Singh said. “We wanted to simplify that process.”
The team started its journey creating the app in March, working on and off during the summer independently and pouring more than 300 hours into the project.
However, the journey was not without challenges. The team encountered significant technical issues, such as the notorious “red wall of death” in Flutter, the chosen programming language.
The “red wall of death” refers to a bug so severe that the entire app interface turns red, often with no clear error message.
“It’s as if your doctor was performing surgery on you without looking at you,” Singh said.
Additionally, they faced problems in their integration with fatsecrets, the food database they selected.
The team received an email from fatsecrets, threatening their access to their resources if the issue was not resolved briefly.
”We were concerned,” Deepak said. “How bad did we mess up that the company is emailing us?”
Despite these hurdles, the team remains confident in the potential of its app.
“We spoke to specific ideas that the industry is very excited about right now, like healthcare and artificial intelligence,” Singh said. “It was a convenient combination, and one for a good cause.”
As the deadline approaches, the team polishes their app, ready to submit Ambrosia to the CAC.
“I’m confident we can win the district,” Singh said.
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