Last week we told you about the Imagine Cup finals in the United States. Team FlashFood from Arizona State University won top honors at the Microsoft event. The team developed a mobile application and website to help restaurants, hotels and farmers markets donate food to people who need it.
The businesses enter information about the food they would like to donate. A notification goes to a team of volunteer drivers who can go pick up the leftover food and take it to people in need. This is perishable food, the kind of food that cannot normally be handled by food banks or other food recovery organizations.
The FlashFood project grew out of the Engineering Projects in Community Service program at Arizona State. The director of that program, Richard Filley, says the project has far-reaching possibilities. Mr. Filley plans to work with the team to find ways to extend the FlashFood app to other countries.
In his words, "Would those cultures in those different countries be open to the idea of taking leftover food and using FlashFood to connect with people who are hungry? We don't know the answer to that yet," says Mr. Filley.
The Imagine Cup is now in its tenth year. Mark Hindsbo is a vice president with Microsoft. He says students who enter the competition can now build their ideas around a lot of technology that was not widely available ten years ago. "In the beginning," he says, "people were building almost everything from scratch." But now, he points to the FlashFood app as a good example of bringing together existing technologies. The students built the app on the assumption that there are smartphones in the hands of most of the people they need to work with. Also, the use of mapping software lets the app give the volunteer drivers turn-by-turn directions to the restaurants with food to donate.
Team FlashFood will represent the United States at the Imagine Cup world finals in Australia in July. Mark Hindsbo says solving world problems like hunger is a major goal of the competition. But another major goal is to get more American students interested in jobs in science and engineering. "When you look at the pipeline in science, technology engineering and math, we come up way short," he says. As a result, he says around a million software and tech jobs could go unfilled in the United States over the next five years.
For VOA Special English, I'm Carolyn Presutti. (Adapted from a radio program broadcast 07May2012)
