Arcadia University Computer Science seniors Alyssa Quisito, Dylan Alexander, and Jason Thomson, overseen by Dr. Vitaly Ford (pictured above from left to right), recently completed a year-long Capstone Project to develop an app for Caring for Friends, a foodbank located in the upper Northeast.
For almost 50 years, Caring for Friends has garnered volunteers to deliver meals to and then visit with homebound seniors, veterans, and those with disabilities. This Capstone focused on creating an app to aid in delivery of these generally home-cooked, frozen meals for the “Meals for Homebound Client Friends” part of the foodbank.
Arcadia University MBA alumnus Jeff Frazier (above, center from left), a volunteer driver for five years via the Abington-Glenside Rotary Club, has directed this and last year’s Capstone Project as a member of the Alumni Association’s Arcadia Business Network. He and Dr. Ford see at least another year to complete the app and further develop a delivery mapping program, which began in 2023’s Capstone.
“It was great to apply what I’ve learned over the course of my college career for this project. I’m forever grateful to have had the opportunity to work not only with Jeff, but my teammates and professor as well. We all did our best working on it, and I’m very excited to see how it progresses in the future,” Quisito said.
“Giving back to the community is something that I try to do frequently as I can, so being given this opportunity to do just that as well as sharpen my skills for my degree meant a lot to me,” Alexander said. “Working on this team has taught me a lot and I can’t wait to see how Caring for Friends develops moving forward.”
“My experience working with Caring for Friends was nothing short of incredible,” said Thompson. “This project gave me my first real experience working with clients to provide a product and it was very insightful. This project taught me a lot about how to properly apply my time to a real project. The experience was something I will never forget, and I am grateful to have that experience with an amazing organization like Caring for Friends.”
Professor Ford explained more of the technical processes involved.
“Academic app development follows a structured process, while real-world app development often gets chaotic.” According to Dr. Ford, the team “went through multiple iterations of identifying the right tools, frameworks, systems, and general technologies” to fit the app’s characteristics of “being scalable, adaptable, and easy to use.”
The team also had to work through “technologies not performing as expected, dependency issues, and difficult authentication flows to learning a new language, cloud system, and development approaches,” Dr. Ford said.
He was pleased that the students brainstormed ideas, troubleshot, researched, and asked questions to make the app production ready, “albeit with a few missing features that the next team could complete.”
Current Chair of the Arcadia Business Network, Frazier foresees engaging students in the School of Global Business to collaborate on other aspects of the app to make it scalable and used as a model nationwide, and possibly through Rotary International.
Of Philadelphia Seniors (60+), 16% or 1-in-6 are food insecure (meaning they are hungry) compared to 7.1% or 1- in-14, nationally, Frazier said. He sees these two Capstone Projects as a model for the Arcadia Business Network.
“Ideally, the ABN can have Arcadia students in various academic disciplines assist other, local non-profit organizations in accounting, logistics, marketing, or in more technical aspects such as systems or app development,” Frazier said. “The Arcadia Business Network can also introduce many students to the non-profit world as there are over 25,000 just in the Philadelphia area.”
Frazier hopes that the Arcadia Business Network will be seen as a resource to some of these efforts.
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Photo: Jeff Frazier