2021 Virginia Datathon

The 2021 Virginia Datathon was a lot different from last year's. Although it was still virtual, my team still got the chance to meet up and discuss our ideas. We finally saw each other in person, and it was great competing with them. Unfortunately, this time, we didn't win anything. However, I'm confident that we will do even better in the future.

This year's prompt was on Addressing Hunger with Bits and Bytes. We were supposed to find some sort of mitigation plan or solution to hunger in Virginia, and use data science to back or drive our solution. Immediately our first thought was to go to food deserts. Food deserts are an awful thing, and let me explain why. So, in low income areas, supermarkets and grocery stores refuse to open due to the unprofitability. As a result, a certain population has no access to fresh produce. Consequently, the area becomes a food desert. Because a large portion of low income areas do not own or have access to transportation, they are suddenly stuck without food. Our thought was to create some sort of mitigation play to either stop existing food deserts, or to prevent future ones.

At least, that was our plan until one of our team members had a brilliant idea: What if we transport "waste" food, or food that's barely expired, to the people who need it. Our method of deployment could be food banks! Each year in the US alone, almost 40% of all food is wasted. This is obviously a huge problem, as we shouldn't have any hungry people if we didn't waste food. Our plan was to incentivize companies to donate their expired and excess food to the people in need. So, why would companies do this? Well, it's because of the Good Samaritan Food Act. This act makes companies who are donating food not responsible for what happens to the people, aka it gives the companies legal protection for their donations. In addition, because farmers markets are nonprofit organizations, donating to them would have a hefty tax return. It was a win-win solution. To actually put our plan into motion, we created an app with a map of the nearest farmers and supermarkets. The app was a lot easier to create than we expected, then again, AppSheet is very intuitive. If you would like to see our final presentation, I have attached it below along with the other presentations!