Meet the team of Kaedan, Ian, Nimit, and Vander. We met at Stem School Highlands Ranch, and have been friends for several years now. Normally we spend time together playing games like D&D, Magic: the Gathering, and video games. This year we decided to participate in TSA for the first time. We were excited to see website design as one of the events.
When we read this year’s topic, we were excited as we had taken a cooking camp over the summer. The camp was a lot of fun, and we thought it would be just as fun to build a recipe website for kids like us. We started out by doing research on recipe books and websites that already exist. We also investigated various platforms and hosting services to use for our website. We chose WordPress because it is easy for beginners to use, and most websites use WordPress. This website was entirley designed by our team including all pages, all posts, and the overall layout. All sourced media, like images and videos, is properly credited under the Sources and Copyrighted Matierals pages.
From our research we learned that kids run into unique challenges with cooking food, compared to adults. Most kids have little to no cooking experience, and many kids don’t even know the basic kitchen tools and cooking terminology. Also most kids don’t go grocery shopping on their own, and are often limited to ingredients they already have at home to make meals. We wanted to keep this in mind when we made our website, so we added pages dedicated to cooking tools and cooking terminology. We also worked with a parent to make sure that our recipes are simple enough for a kid to follow, but at the same time include extra details, about kitchen tools and any necessary safety precautions.
The best interactive feature of our website is the dropdown menu boxes on our homepage. Kids can use this feature to search recipes by course (breakfast, lunch, dinner, dessert.); Skill level (easy, medium, hard.); or recipe tag (ingredients.) We even added a keyword box where users can search any term they like. Our addition interactive features include:
- Site Registration, allowing users to create an account and save recipes as favorites
- Submit a Recipe, allowing users to submit a recipe they would like to add to the site.
We learned a lot while building the site like how to make pages, posts, and how to add and edit widgets. We also learned where to look for stock photos and images as well as improved our skills with programs like canva to creatively use them on our website. We are grateful to be able to participate in this year’s website design competition.