This year's question was about school lunches: how to make them healthy, affordable, and tailored to students needs. To read more check out the question page found here. Our solution had a three main pieces to it, a calorie predictor, a food cost sheet, and an analysis of whether students' needs are met.
The first two parts of our paper were achieved with spreadsheets. We did research on how many calories high school students need given certain factors., We found that through a few inputs (weight, age, gender, activeness, heart rate) one could predict, with amazing accuracy, how many calories that individual needs in a given day to stay healthy.
The second spreadsheet allowed the user to control how much of each food category they were going to feed the students. After choosing the size of the portions, the user would be able to find the total cost of a meal. This would then be used in another sheet to predict the total cost for different school systems.
This allowed for the user to find the cheapest, healthiest, or most appealing menu possible depending on the inputs.
The final piece was to analyze whether students are currently getting enough calories in their school lunches. We found that the average number of calories in a school lunch was 800, which is not enough to meet almost half the students needs. Looking at the data over time we even found that this problem is getting worse as we move into the present and on to the future.
We recently heard back from the judges and unfortunately our paper was not one of the 200 to move on to round two. We are not surprised or disappointed by this as there are over 1200 teams nation wide.