Computer Science

Computer Science, taught by Ms. Taricco, is where we learn to write and implement programs (primarily in Java) as well as understand fundamental concepts behind the basic functionality of these programs. We will also later on design and develop apps as part of a long-term project during the second semester.

Federal Tax Rate Program

This program was written to determine the exact tax an individual must pay based on various factors like income and marital status. Key concepts used during the implementation of the program included conditional logic and "if/else" statements.

Sieve of Eratosthenes

This program used static arrays to find all prime numbers up to any given limit, and reflects the logic used in the original sieve during the 3rd century B.C. Here, "for" loops and "if" statements were used in combination to help eliminate composite numbers in a given list of numbers while retaining the primes.

Problem Statement

Inflation and rising costs of day-to-day consumer products have been heavily linked to a general decrease in grocery affordability in recent years, and the 2020 pandemic created a surge in demand for groceries while food production slowed, making food prices up by 31%. The overall decrease in grocery affordability has been further linked to a decrease in an understanding of budgeting, which makes way to navigate budgeting and grocery expenses for the everyday consumer more and more imperative.

Audience

The proposed app will mainly pertain to a general range of Americans working a job every day. More specifically, this app will help people that have budgeting weekly food expenses, as well as low-income households focus on saving money.

Solution + MVP

Our app, CostGo, aims to help users struggling with grocery affordability and expense management by providing a personalized mobile app experience that determines whether or not superstore memberships are worth it. Since superstores provide the most amount of savings for American consumers compared with regular grocery stores, we wanted to incorporate them into our app in some way. Our Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is an algorithmic model that takes various user inputs, such as number of people per household, number of weekly trips to the grocery store, car mileage, and much more to determine whether the user is fit for a Costco membership or not. The output of the model is a net gain/loss per year for the user depending on their inputs in the questionnaire, as well as other model statistics. The other part of the MVP is a webview of all of the Costco warehouse locations in the United States, if the user wanted to look further into the location aspect of the superstore. In the future, we hope to expand the app to pertain to superstores other than Costco, and include personalized grocery lists that maximize savings per trip to the store.