News from The Record: The following story appeared in the October 27th issue of The Record.
Caring Through Code: Students Program Website for Friendly Fridge Bronx
By Gillian Ho, Staff Writer
Over the summer, four students created The Feed a Friend Bronx web application (feedafriendbx.com) for the Friendly Fridge organization, designed to redirect food to the Bronx community through public fridges. The website, coded by Nathaniel Garelik (12), Sawyer Scheiner (11), Thomas Benissan (11), and Henry Greenhut (12), aims to provide a space for businesses and individuals to post about leftover food, which can then be picked up and delivered to the fridge by volunteers. “Essentially, it’s the community fridge version of Uber Eats,” Greenhut said.The students were introduced to the organizers of Friendly Fridge Bronx, Selma Raven and Sara Allen, during their grade wide Service-Learning Day conferences last school year, Director of the Center for Community Values and Action (CCVA) Dr. Kimberly Joyce-Bernard said.
The Friendly Fridge’s mission is to provide food for people that might have difficulty paying for it, Scheiner said. The team thus wanted to use their coding skills to expand their reach and help even more people, he said.
The four students first met with Allen and Raven to learn about the problem that they were tasked with and then brainstorm how to tackle it, Greenhut said. “Throughout the summer, we regularly met with them virtually to update them on our progress and receive feedback on our design,” he said.
One of the fridges is located down the hill from the school, where the group noticed that the organization did not have an online presence to adapt to the evolving digital world. “We decided the delivery website would be the best way to [boost their donations and expand their impact],” Garelik said.
The process to build the website began in May of last year when they met with Raven, Allen, and their faculty advisor, Associate Director of the CCVA Fabio Puello, Scheiner said. The CCVA helped the group get in touch with the Friendly Fridge and oversaw their work, but the four students primarily worked independently throughout the project, Garelik said. “The CCVA would check in on us over the summer, but a lot of the process was just the four of us texting,” he said.
The four students all had a background and a passion for computer science, Garelik said. “We all have a strong foundation on code to any coding language words and we also have a general understanding of JavaScript, HTML, CSS, and other basic languages,” he said.
However, in order to build the website, the group had to learn more about coding, from working with source control (the practice of tracking and managing changes to code) to debugging errors, Garelik said. “We spent a lot of time experimenting with React and JavaScript and we were able to learn about website development from collaborating with each other,” he said.
Coordinating who was working on what tasks in order to avoid people repeating the same work was a challenge for the group, Greenhut said. “We were also unfamiliar with some of the coding libraries and databases used,” he said. “As time went on, we became more experienced coders and more effective collaborators.”
Eventually, the four hope that the organization will be able to use the website to provide a cash incentive for delivery drivers. He also wants to work with the CCVA to facilitate more computer science projects that will allow other students interested in computer science to put their skills to use, Garelik said.