Hi, My name is Sabarish Mogallapalli, I am a 7th grader from Waukee Middle School in Des Moines, Iowa.
I really enjoy science, I like the various components it adheres to and also enjoy the basis of STEM. I also love participating in STEM related activities around me.
I also enjoy researching things. I like looking into different sources and understanding the jist of the subject. Another aspect I enjoy of research is arguments. I like looking at different sources and differentiating biased and unbiased sources.
A year ago while I was participating in the FIRST Lego League Challenge my team was tasked with coming up with a solution to the topic of “Trash”.
I thought about this hard, wondering what my team could do and decided to skim the web for any ideas. I skimmed the web and found different topics my team could do like, littering, recycling being thrown into the waste, and waste being thrown into recycling and many other ideas we could use as problems. We also met with many professionals from trash related careers to get more information of the problems in the waste community.
We had a bunch of ideas but finally came up with a problem we wanted to work on. How were we going to reach the community with our ideas to deal with waste? After thinking for a while we brainstormed ideas on what would be the easiest way to bring our idea of dealing with trash to as many people in the community. We came up with the idea of using an app. After looking at many other waste related app ideas we quickly came to a stasis that our app had to be unique.
Our app idea was Iowa Trash Companion, this app was designed around 5 parts which soon became features to our app.
1. Calendar
The calendar is from Metro Waste Authority, a waste picking service in Iowa. This will notify the users about different waste related events around the users community like spring clean up.
2. Notifications
The notifications feature will notify the user about weekly pick up reminders and waste related events around their community.
Special pickup request form
The special pickup request form feature will allow the user to request a special pickup from their trash collector.
3. Custom search engine
The custom search engine will allow the user to search up a household item that they are unsure of how to recycle or dispose of, our app will tell the user if it can be recycled, what type of waste it comes under, where you can recycle or dispose of it, if any facilities will take that item, and lastly if there are any preparations or costs needed before disposing of the item.
4. Preferences
The preferences feature allows the user to set up the date and time of their reminders for their pickup, and set up their notifications.
We encountered many obstacles during the organizing and planning phase of our project.
We had a problem finding the right tools and technology for our needs and necessities. We initially started by using tools like Google slides, and MS Word to create our prototype on. After we found Fluid UI we started using the BETA, which had limited tools and features, which limited our capacity for our building of the prototype. We have limited sources of help (Sponsors) and technology guidance (help with coding, and software tools). We are currently struggling with this problem. We had very very little support from the school (Guidance, Resources, and Time).
We are still struggling through these obstacles but we are motivated and determined towards working through them and have learned how to overcome failure in our research and invention.