The Problem

The manager of the school cafeteria has come to you and your team for help. The manager needs better information to use in making decisions about what food, and how much of each food, to prepare. This project involves designing and implementing a data collection system that will help culinary arts personnel make reliable decisions about menu planning.

Successful Menuy Planning:

Successful menu planning requires, among other things, reliable information about student preferences for the various food items. Experience in the Davea cafeteria has shown that food preferences vary by:

* school (e.g. Pizza puffs are more popular at some schools than others)
* day of the week (e.g. Some days are slow days for some items...maybe because the same items are offered at the students' own schools on a prior day ?)
* other factors ?? (boy/girl ? grade in school ? )

Aspects of the project will include:

1. Designing a survey (questionnaire) that will provide base line data on student preferences for food types (hamburgers, pizza puffs, etc.)

2. Determining relevant student background data to be collected: school; gender; grade; day of week of survey; (others? )

3. Preparing html document, including response form

4. Providing for linkage between html document and a database program such as Filemaker Pro.

5. Deciding which descriptive statistics to use to report (and display) preference patterns. The data will be organized in such a way that various displays can readily be generated. (By school, day of week, etc.)

Sample student data:

During the week of November 4, 1996, a trial survey was used to collect student food preference data.