Swipe Out Hunger
Which dining halls have the
highest/lowest participation in Swipe Out
Starvation?
Survey, data visualization
Demand for automatically donating
swipes
survey
A/B testing of posters to create
awareness
A/B testing, clustering, data visualization
Predict the impact of new posters / public
awareness campaign
Regression, machine learning
Packback:
Our group has identified the problem of hunger in the world as the one that we would like
to help solve or alleviate. Obviously, there are many organizations with sufficient resources
trying to solve this problem already. Therefore, we are trying to focus on what we can do close
to Purdue’s campus. There is already a program that helps address this problem called Swipe
Out Starvation. Swipe Out Starvation allows Purdue students to donate meal swipes that they
have. Purdue will give $1 for each swipe to one of four charities, Food Finders, ACE Campus
Food Pantry, and Land of a Thousand Hills. This program is really nice as it allows students who
don’t have a lot of money to be a part of helping alleviate hunger. In our experience, however,
many students don’t know that this program exists. A potential way that the impact of Swipe Out
Starvation could be heightened is by allowing Purdue students to automatically donate their
extra swipes to the program without having to spend them. We would like to talk to Purdue
Dining about building functionality for their Dining program that would allow students to opt in to
automatically donate these swipes. Unfortunately, this project only spans two months. Purdue
Dining is also a large, bureaucratic organization, and they often take a lot of time to work with.
While we try to work with Purdue Dining, we will simultaneously be conducting surveys. We will
post these surveys in every dining court, and potentially in a few retail places as well. These
surveys will ask what grade the student is in, if they have ever heard of Swipe Out Starvation, if
they have ever donated swipes to the program, and if they would opt into a program
automatically donating their extra swipes to Swipe Out Starvation. We would then analyze and
visualize these data to show the potential impact of allowing students to automatically donate
swipes. This relates to the ethics of data science because it will be identifying a real world
problem (starvation) and try to solve it by using data science (online surveys, exploratory data
analysis /developing a method with Purdue Dining). We could also potentially use A/B testing to
test different posters or strategies to build awareness and support for Swipe Out Starvation, and
predict the impact our efforts will have on hunger using machine learning. Our project is related
to the ethics of data science because we are using data science to achieve a moral/ethical goal
of reducing hunger, a problem that we morally ought to alleviate, according to the arguments of
Singer.
What Needs To Be Done:
Write Project Workback Schedule - Should have 4 sections, one for each part of the
rubric. Should talk about why our project addresses an ethical issue.
Make the Initial Survey - George - [10/11]
The Form
The Actual Document
Talk to Prof. Messina [10/3] - Thanmaya
Ask about incentivizing survey
Ask about getting the $1000
Contact Purdue Dining - Thanmaya - [10/6]
Ask about building functionality for automatically donating swipes
Ask why Swipe Out Starvation only gets $1 per swipe
Ask about building online portal for donating swipes
Print and Post the physical surveys in Dining courts/other places of interest [10/16 10/30]
Ask Permission at the Smalley Center- Hemisha [10/6]
Lawson OTG - Hemisha
Ford - Thanmaya
Wiley - George
Windsor - Jack
Hillenbrand - Anay
Earhart - George
Frieda Lobby(Chick-fil-A + Jersey Mikes) - Jack
Write and Post Third Project Update [11/2] - Name
Make the Second Survey - George [10/30]
The Form
The Actual Document
Print and Post Second Survey [11/2 - 11/15]
Ford - Thanmaya
Wiley - George
Windsor - Jack
Hillenbrand - Anay
Earhart - George
Frieda Lobby(Chick-fil-A + Jersey Mikes) - Jack
Lawson OTG - Hemisha
Analyze First vs. Second Survey - Everyone
First [11/6]
Second [11/21]
Combined[11/21]
If applicable - Build functionality for Automatic donation - Everyone
Make Final Video to show to class [11/30] - Everyone
Visualize
Make Presentation for Video [11/27]
Write Report [12/10]