>> Stick around for the Low Code Revolution.
In this episode, we're going to be talking to
a group of university students who built
a Power App in only three hours with
no prior experience to manage insulin levels.
Stick around and we'll see you in Low Code Revolution.
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>> Hey everyone, welcome to
another episode of the Low Code Revolution.
I'm your host, April Dunnam and today we're
joined by a group of university students who
participated in their very first Power Platform hackathon and
built a very cool insulin tracking application on Power Apps.
Welcome everyone to the show.
>> Hi, lovely to see you today.
>> Thank you so much.
>> Would you mind going around just doing
a really quick introduction
so we can get to know you-all a little bit better?
>> I'll start. My name is Akshay,
I'm studying at Heriot-Watt University.
I'm about to enter my fourth year and I'm doing
computer science with a specialization in software engineering.
>> I'm Isaac Diaby and an ethical hacking student,
Abertay University and I'm also economics major as well.
>> Hi, I'm David.
I am second year computing science student
at the University of Glasgow.
I have a little startup of my own making mobile apps
similar to Power Apps that we did at
the hackathon and I am a Type 1 diabetic,
which was the inspiration for what we did at the hackathon.
>> Hi, my name is Karim Wahdan.
I'm a university student studying at
Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh.
I'm going to my third year.
I'm studying information systems,
so in text over just a different degree of texts,
so much more looking at and data analysis and how can we
bring technology into business users
and the value of stream of that.
>> Perfect. Thank you-all so much for coming on the show.
I would love to know, maybe Akshay,
you could tell me a little bit more about how did
you-all make the decision to join
the hackathon and want to learn more about
Power Apps and what was your experience like?
>> It was a little bit of
a coincidence really because I got an e-mail from
a university talking about hackathons that
were going in and around my area so Edinburgh,
Glasgow in and around Scotland.
I wasn't interested in the ones that
were directly sent by my university,
so I did my own digging.
I went on Eventbrite and I found
the Microsoft Accessibility hackathon that was going on.
On a whim, I just decided to message a bunch of
people I know who were in and around
computing spaces and I just said,
''Yo, we should go do this.''
These were the first people that replied.
Working with Power Apps on the day it was very interesting.
Me and Isaac met up the day before we went to the actual event.
It was like three hours or
four hours that we just sat down at a cafe.
We were trying to figure out what we were
actually going to do because we were very stressed.
It was our first ever like hackathon experience.
We didn't know what to expect.
It was like a very new way to code because
definitely it made us a lot better at like
planning and just time management in general.
We sat down for a solid two hours just
trying to familiarize ourself with Power Platform.
Then we had like an idea here and
idea there but nothing concrete that we could say,
yeah, we could definitely build upon this tomorrow in
a brainstorming session and
have an actual product by the end of it.
Basically, for me and Isaac had that chat.
We ended up calling David and
David started talking about his experience with diabetes,
which I'm sure he will cover on later.
But basically based on that,
we ended up building upon that and understanding what David
goes through on a day-to-day
and basically that led us to where we are with the application.
>> That's amazing. You hadn't even
heard of the Power Platform before or had any experience with it,
but decided to just dive right in
and try hackathon and see what you could build.
That's super awesome.
I'd love to hear maybe from
David so that the application scenario,
how did that come about during the hackathon that you settled on
this insulin management application and how did you find
the experience of building it out inside of Power Apps?
>> Well, I think I've had diabetes for about five years now.
It's part of my life now
and I've had a lot of different piece of technology to
help me out on that to the point where as I've
gotten to use a lot of new technology that's coming out.
It's made it so that it
almost doesn't feel like I have diabetes in my life.
But something that's always bothered me since I got diagnosed is
just the one thing is how
complicated it is if you're trying to have a meal,
to figure out the nutritional content in that meal.
You might go to a restaurant's website
to find nutritional info on there,
there's a lot of different websites you can use,
but you just have to find what you can.
Sometimes different things work out.
Sometimes they don't. It's all a bit complicated.
It just feels like with the technology
and the data we have out there,
there's a much better way to do this.
I've thought about that for a long time and being
able to work with my friends here on
brainstorming it and coming up with the best way to
make it easier and being able to
prototype it really easily and quickly with Power Apps on the day.
I think we built something quite.
This can be really helpful,
hopefully in future for
diabetics and getting feedback on that prototype was really great.
To hear that people thought it looked really good.
But I think that's a real power of Power Apps.
Is that well accessibility
in the world of mobile apps is becoming even more
important as day by day
because so many people do have
a disability or a need that accessibility can help with.
As I say, there's a lot of
new technology out there now that can make it feel
like those disabilities that you or many of
your friends will have almost isn't in your life anymore,
which is really amazing to be able to do.
What's amazing is as someone with a disability like diabetes,
knowing how that affects you,
like anyone who has those experiences firsthand,
can build something that can make
other people's experiences better with this local platform,
which I'm sure Karim is going to
talk about a bit more in a moment.
But anyone can step in and do this and prototype;
make something amazing that it's going to make people's lives
so much better with Power Apps technology, it's really amazing
>> I love that. Such a great story
of how you have a personal use case
like that and you're able to solve it so
quickly with Power Apps and in turn,
something that we're going to help so many others as well.
Karim, maybe if you wouldn't mind touching on a little bit
about the accessibility aspect of this.
What did you-all do since this was an accessibility hackathon
to meet the accessibility
needs and make the application accessible?
>> Absolutely. I think one of the great things
I'm going to be about us being able to make it accessible.
Especially to understand is
that like subparts, often very collaborative.
It allows people from all different use cases where individuals
who maybe developer or individuals who are
low quarters or even non-court collaboratively work together.
Especially, in Canada's contexts.
You have individuals in all different strength
and all different skills.
What it allows is individuals who may not even be able
to code at all but have for example, experiences,
accessibility issues able to implement and
[inaudible] in developing the application.
One of these examples of when we
had there was perceived myself on much
[inaudible] individual and my [inaudible] too much encoding.
For me there being able to still work with them.
Even so where Isaac can actually give
you a bit more into coding and
programming giving developers was
a very effective way of collaborating together.
Then an overall of this PowerPoint and allowing
individuals from all different disciplines able to
work together and implement
their skills in a collaborative manner is extremely beneficial.
>> For sure. He talks a lot about the application.
I am dying to see it in action.
Could someone showcase the app that he built?
>> Yeah, of course is right here.
There's not a lot of UI stuff down.
Basically, here we have the actual insulin calculator.
Can everyone see my screen first of all? Just to check.
>> Yeah, we see it.
>> Amazing. If we go to the top right here,
we can add new recipe.
To add new recipe, you have to take
a screenshot of the recipe and there is
an AI component in Power Apps that scans text.
I took a screenshot earlier of a recipe for Halloumi Fajitas.
If we click on the photo.
This is a screenshot of the actual recipe that I took earlier.
Well to scan every single one of the things,
it will get rid of the ingredients.
Then once we upload it,
we have that there we can check all the ingredients.
I'm not sure of what that part works.
The actual insulin selection.
But the idea behind this was you could look through this to
see the individual calories that we have on every
single one of the items that you're eating.
You will have a list of recipes here of meals that you've
previously cooked and using the search function.
Another thing that I had an idea
for a day or two before that one was,
if we have this where we're sorting everything by ingredients.
You could also build upon it and make it like
a recipe platform almost where you could
type in ingredients that you have currently in your pantry and it
can tell you what you can make based on previous meals.
But in general flow,
you would use the photo part and
you take a photo of the ingredients.
It would give you the breakdown of all the ingredients here,
the calorie counts, the micronutrients.
You would be able to calculate the actual insulin all from that.
David sent me this government index
of foods that are in UK supply,
and they're like micronutrient breakdown.
What we would do is we
would take something like two tablespoons of olive oil.
We would take the olive oil part,
search it through the index and then based
on the value that they said per gram,
per teaspoon, per tablespoon.
We would calculate this and have a number there.
Then when you press that,
it would go to the actual insulin calc screen and
show you the actual amount
of insulin that needs to be administered.
We didn't have the time to implement
every single part of that in that [inaudible] Obviously,
with that being our first occupant.
We didn't have as much experience developing in
that space within that limited amount of time.
But I think for the amount of time that we had,
we got something that's very functional out the door on the day.
>> Absolutely. This is amazing.
I'm super impressed with how you're able
to do something integration PowerApp platform.
We're able to interact with AI Builder and
be able to pull in and read from
the recipes there with some of
the forms detection and
also leveraging [inaudible] like you mentioned.
To be able to pull information in from other data sources into
database to get that information and do the calculations.
I know the [inaudible] said,
is limited time so you didn't really
get a lot of time to just everything.
But how quickly were you able to build that application?
Keeping in mind everyone watching that
these people have never built a PowerApp before.
How quickly were able to build that?
>> Absolute. Interesting question, all things considered.
I don't know if you can pull up a phone,
but we had these whiteboards.
I soon as we got there,
for the first hour we were just brainstorming.
We had a piece of white paper.
Everyone of the Hackathon was slow and actually
writing out notes and actually
the planning everything step-by-step.
We literally as soon as they said go we run to the whiteboard.
We started jotting down every single idea that we possibly had.
We have this massive,
I think Isaac still has it in his room to this day.
>> Oh, yeah.
>> You want me to fill out.
>> I'm curious now.
>> But we basically jotted down every idea that we possibly had.
How this would look functionally.
>> Nice.
>> We spent a lot of time planning,
and then even when we got to
the stages where we were trying to develop.
A lot of it we had to Google search this,
how to do this, how to do this.
But we step-by-step,
all things considered Google's documentation
on Power Apps is actually really good.
Which is not something I can say about law of others.
It helped me learn extremely quickly how to do even simpler tasks.
It helped me get to grips and I'd say pretty soon.
Within an hour and a half,
we were in a good developmental flow where we were actually
getting little sprints down where
we're finishing off small sections of the project part-by-part.
Obviously, we had a lot of help from
the actual organizers of the event and the people there.
I'd say altogether our entire development period
was about two hours
or three with a lunch break in there somewhere.
>> Can I quickly add. Basically, on top of that.
We were literally surrounded
around really intelligent people as well.
They knew so many application as well.
>> So many.
>> Before even entering with hackathon as well,
we already went through like our game plan.
Someone knew already what was going to do,
what we wanted to build out.
It was relatively easier to actually just
get into the workload from that point.
>> Yeah, definitely.
>> I'll say, I love hearing that.
The power of the Power Platform is just
how fast and easy it is to get started,
and no really previous experience needed for that.
You're able to do such cool things like what you-all did with
the AI integration and all that
and build an app that's going to help a lot of people.
Kudos to all of you for taking a leap in their
to participate in a hackathon and
building such an amazing app. Thank you so much.
>> Thank you.
>> It's been great having you on the show.
Thank you-all for watching and we'll see
you next time on the Low Code Revolution.
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