Our app idea is based on the thought that it will help decreasing food waste.
One of the first steps in our job with this part of the project is to investigate to see if this is true.
So we started our investigation with the question:
Will the food waste decrease if the students get to choose what they are having for lunch?
We sent out a general survey to the students in our school. We asked them what they think about the food in school right now and if they thought that they would eat more if they got to choose the food.
And the students seems to agree with us, about 90% answered that they thougt they would throw away less if they got to choose their lunch. Around 60% likes the food, 60% stated that they do sometimes throw away food and 70% said that they wanted a pasta dish as a standard option.
Moving forward with this information we needed to investigate if this really would work in real life or just in theory.
What would we like to know?
Preparing the investigation, we planned it carefully. How could we measure the waste and what else did we want to measure? Who should be a part of the investigation? What materials will we need to execute the investigation?
We decided to only use one class when we did the investigation in the lunchroom. The plan is to first weigh their plate with their food and then the plate with the left-over waste. The students will also do a survey after lunch grading the food or why they chose not to eat. This will be done during three days in February.
The next step will be to repeat the investigation with the difference of the students being able to choose and preorder the food of each day.
Planning and prepairing the practical parts of the investigation
We chose three girls to take care of the practical parts in the investigation and three who would be in charge of the survey for the first part.
The day before the investigation started, we prepared by gathering the materials like scales and lists.We also and sent out the links for the surveys and informed the teachers who would help with getting the class to do the surveys.
Investigating- problems and success
Day one of the investigation we had a problem with the scales. The plates filled with food were too heavy for the scales we had in our science class. But we weighed the plates we could and found other scales for the next day.
Day two and three worked a lot smoother. We got almost all the students to cooperate and weigh their plates.
After our 3 days of doing the investigation the work with analyzing and processing the data now begins. 