SBIR Phase II: A Novel Approach To STEM Education Through A Personalized Mobile Cooking App For K-8 Students

This SBIR Phase II project involves developing a gamified educational platform for use by K-6 students, their teachers and parents. The application allows users to learn about various topics-including STEAM (mainly science and math), nutrition, and geography. The curriculum is culturally sensitive and also compliant with Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) as the students learn to cook recipes from around the world. By engaging students with carefully developed interactive content, the project aims to simultaneously develop a highly practical and useful life skill (healthy cooking), create excitement about learning, and enhance student proficiency in STEAM concepts related to nutrition and global competence, when compared to a traditional school curriculum. The project aims to tackle both the failure in STEAM teaching and the obesity crisis children in the US face today. Its goal is to improve the health, education and happiness of children across the country, which is consistent with the NSF mission to advance the national health, prosperity, and welfare. During Phase II, we will develop the current version of the project into a commercially viable educational platform, by incorporating innovative components and features, the importance of which emerged during customer discovery interviews with teachers. The finalized application will include: novel gamification features, class monitoring tools for teachers, an adaptive learning component (for more effective student learning), and an intelligent recommendation system for determining students' latent food proclivities "i.e., food dimensions that children often have a hard time articulating their preferences on, yet which play an important role in determining overall food liking" and providing healthy recipe suggestions tailored to each student's palate. This carefully crafted combination of features is meant to enhance students' learning experience and their engagement with the platform. The finalized platform will be a robust, responsive multiplatform web application that includes a complete set of K-6 lesson plans aligned with national and state educational standards and delivers an individualized learning experience to students. The learning effectiveness of the lesson plans, included scientific concepts, and gamification and personalization features will be thoroughly evaluated through in-class testing, while the recommendation system will involve the use of supervised Machine Learning. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.