MHCI Team Takes Honors in CMU iOS App Challenge
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Everyone’s been in that situation: You go out for a meal with friends or co-workers and chaos arrives with the check. Someone pays too little, someone forgets to include tax and tip. And you end up stuck paying for way more than what you ate.
A team of students from Carnegie Mellon’s Master of Human-Computer Interaction program is trying to make paying the check a little less painful for everyone with their app, ProportionAte. According to developers Juan Corzo, Saba Kazi and Jaydev Kumar, Proportionate allows users to snap a photo of the bill with their iPhone and share information with their fellow diners using AirDrop. Then everyone can select the items they ate, and the app updates the information in real-time to provide a bill breakdown that’s accurate and simple.
The team created ProportionAte as part of Carnegie Mellon’s iOS App Challenge, a coding competition held on campus last month that challenges groups of three students to program an app in just one week. Apple engineers provided training, oversight and final judgment as teams raced to the finish. When all was said and done, the MHCI team walked away with second-place honors (out of 26 entries) and an iPad Air for each team member.
“This is a great example of how our master’s students transform what is often a tedious task into a delightful experience,” said MHCI Director Laura Ballay.
For more on the app, check out http://challengepost.com/software/proportionate.