Tomorrow's Engineers Cook Up A Fast-Food Application: Lessons From A Student Competition

Speakers

Mara Pillott

Application Engineering Manager

Inductive Automation

Reese Tyson

Sales Engineer III

Inductive Automation

Annabelle Haley

Educational Engagement Program Specialist

Inductive Automation

We’re serving up something deliciously different for this month’s webinar, which asks the question: What happens when you challenge engineering students to build an application for a fully automated burger restaurant? You’ll find out as Sales Engineers from Inductive Automation examine the winning project from this year’s Student Build-a-Thon competition and explore how to take its capabilities even further.

You'll learn how to structure a working project with ordering interfaces, inventory management, alarming, navigation, and more, and see development techniques, best practices, and clever design tricks that you can apply to your own Ignition projects.

• Make polished UIs for real-time ordering
• Configure alarms based on inventory thresholds
• Leverage the Power Chart, Ignition Historian, and more
• Create seamless navigation with docked views

If you’re hungry for some application-design inspiration, register now. Even if you can’t attend, we’ll email the recording to you.

Transcript: 

00:00
Reese Tyson: Hello and welcome to our exciting webinar today, Tomorrow's Engineers Cook Up a Fast-Food Application: Lessons from a Student Competition. We're so glad that you've joined us. I'm Reese Tyson. I'm a sales engineer here at Inductive Automation. I think I have one of the best jobs as a sales engineer because I get to work on and talk about exciting Ignition projects really all day long. And that's no different today, where we'll be talking about the winning Student Build-a-Thon project. Joining me today is Mara. Mara, I guess, as well as Annabelle, is there too, but Mara, would you like to give a quick intro to yourself?

00:39
Mara Pillott: Sure. I am Mara Pillott, and I think I have one of the best jobs here at Inductive Automation. I'm one of our application engineering managers. I've been working with Ignition for many years. Some of you might know me from Power Hour or some of the Design Like a Pro webinars. So I would highly suggest you go on our website and search for Design Like a Pro for some more design knowledge after this webinar. And I think our application engineering team here is pretty awesome. So we are responsible for the public demo, many of the demos you see at the conferences, and a lot of our exchange resources. And we also got to help judge this competition. Over to you, Annabelle.

01:23
Annabelle Haley: Hi, everyone. My name is Annabelle Haley. I'm the educational engagement program specialist here at Inductive Automation. I will throw my hat in the ring for having the best job here at Inductive Automation as well. So I work with schools regularly, faculty members, and students and help provide educational licensing for Ignition, provide resources, and provide support, really just making sure that any educational organizations that would like to use Ignition in their curriculum or research, or whatever, are successful with it. That's my main goal. So I'll speak a little bit more about that later. But for now, I'll turn it back over to Reese.

01:58
Reese Tyson: Perfect. Yeah, I suppose we can all claim the best job at IA title. No problems with that. But here's our agenda for today. Obviously, we had speaker introductions there first. We'll talk a little bit about what Inductive Automation is and what Ignition is if you aren't aware, just briefly, and then we'll talk a little bit about the educational engagement program, what Annabelle was just describing. And after that, Mara and I are going to dig into the Student Build-a-Thon project. And at the end, we'll do Q&A and take any questions that you may have about that project. So if you want to ask us any questions, just type them into the questions area of the GoTo Webinar control panel, and we'll answer as many as we can. If we can't get to your question today, of course, definitely reach out to one of our account reps; I'd be happy to answer it for you there. So in case you're not familiar with Inductive Automation, here are a few facts about us. Our software, Ignition, is used by 65% of the Fortune 100, which means it's being used really every single day inside of some of the world's biggest companies.

03:03
Reese Tyson: We have over 4,000 integrators worldwide in our Ignition integrator program, and we have a highly diversified customer base across many industries with thousands of Ignition installations in over 140 countries. We've been in the industry for over 22 years, and we have over 350 employees in the US and in Australia as well. I mentioned that our software is called Ignition, right? But what does Ignition do? Ignition is a universal industrial application platform for HMI, SCADA, MES, IoT, and a lot more, really. You've got to think of it as a central hub for anything on the plant floor and beyond. You can use it to create any kind of industrial application. And a couple of nice things about it are that it's web-based, it's web-managed, and it's web-deployed, which makes it really easy to use. We have an unlimited licensing model. You can use it on Windows, Linux, or Mac if you really want to. And of course, Ignition also has industrial-strength security and stability. So just a really quick overview about what Inductive Automation is and what Ignition is. And with that, I'm going to hand it over to Annabelle to talk more about the education engagement program and kind of how the Student Build-a-Thon fits into that. So with that, Annabelle, I'm going to change the presenter to you, and you have full control there.

04:34
Annabelle Haley: Oh, okay, perfect. So the Student Build-a-Thon was an idea brought to life by the Educational Engagement Program and the sales engineering teams. We really wanted to find a way to get students involved with the exciting challenges that we are known for here at Inductive Automation. Mara is going to go into detail on the Build-a-Thon and the Student Build-a-Thon a little bit later, but before that, I'm just going to go through some Educational Engagement Program specifics, just in case you don't know about the Educational Engagement Program. We're going to go through a high-level overview right now. The Educational Engagement Program is a small but mighty team consisting of myself and David Grussenmeyer, our Industry and Education Engagement Manager. We're always here to help answer any questions you may have. We also have a general inbox for the program that is monitored daily. You can see that email listed below at the bottom of this slide. So please feel free to reach out to that or to myself, David; we're both on LinkedIn. You can email us. We're really just here to help answer any questions that you may have. Now a little bit on the Educational Engagement Program and how it came to be. So this program was really born out of a need identified by the company, as academic professionals would come to Inductive Automation and ask how they could start teaching Ignition in their classrooms.

05:53
Annabelle Haley: Before January 2020, our team would field these requests as they came and provide free educational licensing on a case-by-case basis. But it really became clear that through engaging with these educational organizations more formally, we could truly reach the next generation of engineers and implement Ignition directly into their studies. This helps the engineers of tomorrow, which is really what we're talking about today. It helps them become more successful and well-equipped as they enter the job market, which in turn helps our customers have a larger Ignition talent pool to pull from. It's what we like to call a win-win-win situation. As you can see from our vision statement here, the emphasis on bridging the gap between industry and education is really what drives the Educational Engagement Program forward and helps shape the Student Build-a-Thon competition. The program's goal is quite simple: to get Ignition into the hands of as many students as possible. So how are we doing on that goal? Well, just this year, we've added 50 new educational organizations. Our Educational Engagement Program is currently working with nearly 300 educational organizations using Ignition in over 30 countries. Our international distributor network, who will get a shout-out at the end of this webinar in case you're located in a country outside of the States, has really helped with our footprint at schools all over the world.

07:14
Annabelle Haley: We also work with over 15 different academic programs. Now, if you aren't familiar with Ignition, it is a very versatile software that can be used in a variety of ways. Some of the more popular programs using Ignition in academics include electrical engineering, automation, mechatronics, controls, and instrumentation, but there are also some other programs that may not be front of mind when you think of Ignition in schools, like high-powered rocketry, laser technology, and fermentation. Oftentimes, students are actually doing the design work in Ignition, but we also support use cases where the student is simply interfacing and collecting data from Ignition as a viewer. We're very flexible and willing to work with a variety of different educational use cases. Now, speaking of flexibility, we don't only work with schools that want to incorporate Ignition into their curriculum. As you can see from that last bullet point on the slide, we are currently supporting 20 different academic research projects using Ignition. Through the educational engagement program, we can support curriculum, research, student design capstone projects, and even events like student competitions, i.e., the Student Build-a-Thon, but we also support competitions that are held by external organizations.

08:25
Annabelle Haley: So let's talk a little bit about how exactly we're supporting these organizations and what the benefits of our program include. So educational licensing, that's a big one. The way that we provide licensing through the educational engagement program is we donate it totally free of charge. We can provide as many activations as are needed. We can provide as many modules as you need; we really try to keep things as open as possible. Now, there is a caveat. The license is technically a leased license, so we provide it. It's usually good for about a year, depending on the use case, and then we check in two weeks before that expiration date, just to see if the organization is still using Ignition, and then we renew for another year. So we keep it going on that running annual basis. As long as the school is using Ignition, we're happy to keep it active. We also have some curriculum material. Some of you on the call may have gone through our training courses, our core courses, our prospective courses, database scripting, that sort of thing. This curriculum material is a little bit different than that. It wasn't developed formally by our training team, so they did have a say and helped collaborate on the material. But the curriculum material that we developed is specifically focused on implementing Ignition into an entry-level undergraduate class focused on introducing students to SCADA and Ignition and those different features. So this is freely available to schools who'd like to use Ignition. If you're curious about it yourself, please feel free to reach out, and I'll help provide that to you.

09:52
Annabelle Haley: We also offer free certification tests for faculty members and students who are part of the educational engagement program. So students and faculty who have completed the Inductive University credential do qualify. We try to minimize the cost of getting their core certification, so we are happy to provide that core certification test for free. Sales engineering support. Mara and Grace on the call are perfect examples of this. We work very closely with our sales engineering and application engineering teams and try to provide as much support as we can, whether that be demos, presentations to the students, or really however we can help make sure they have that technical level of expertise. Industry connections. We're always happy to introduce schools to various integrators and users, whoever they can work with and collaborate with to make sure the students have the knowledge they need as they graduate. And active communication guidance. Always here to answer any questions you have about the program. Well, that's all for me for now. I'm going to pass it over to Mara to discuss the Student Build-a-Thon competition and how exactly we challenge these students.

11:01
Mara Pillott: Thanks, Annabelle. So, Student Build-a-Thon. Next slide, please. What is it? This was inspired by Inductive Automation's popular Integrator Build-a-Thon. So this is held annually before and during our Ignition Community Conference. And this is a live challenge. Two teams go head-to-head, and the audience votes on a winner. The work is serious, but there is plenty of humor involved. If you have not seen a Build-a-Thon, I would suggest you go to our YouTube channel for Inductive Automation and search for Build-a-Thon. So we couldn't let the integrators have all the fun. So we offered a similar challenge to students nationwide in April. This was a remote challenge with only 72 hours to build. We gave them the project requirements on Friday, and the submissions were due Monday. We also threw in a twist on Sunday morning. The teams were made up of one to four students. They had to be actively enrolled at an academic institution. We also asked that one team member be credentialed in our Inductive University. Every year, the Build-a-Thon Challenge has a theme. And this year we asked the competitors to build an interface for an automated fast food restaurant. After our judges reviewed each submission thoroughly, it was the team from Clovis Community College, Clovis Crush, based in Fresno, California, who claimed the title of the first Student Build-a-Thon winners. Our runner-up was the Ignite team from the University of Kentucky. Congratulations to our winning team members. Also, a huge shout-out to all the teams that participated. We had a fantastic turnout, and we hope to make it even bigger next year. And speaking of next year, yes, we are bringing Student Build-a-Thon back. We're already gearing up for the next round, and trust us, it's going to be even bigger. One of the best parts of today's webinar is that we're going to take a deep dive into this year's winning project. Not just to show off what made it awesome, but to give all of you future competitors a serious leg up. We'll break down the strategy, the design, and the extra touches that made it stand out. So if you're thinking about throwing your hat in the ring next year, pay attention. This is your blueprint for building something bold, competitive, and totally next level.

13:32
Mara Pillott: So in this challenge, every team stepped into the role of a CTO for a next-generation fast food startup. The mission was to build a fully automated restaurant system that's not just functional but disruptive, cutting labor costs, driving revenue, and delivering a seamless, mouthwatering customer experience. This project required five distinct pages, each with specific criteria. So we'll get into the details throughout the project, but generally this is the app they had to create. First up, the order interface. This is where our end user is going to interact with the system and order their food items. We kept the menu simple. They just had burgers, fries, and shakes to choose from. And after placing the order, we wanted the customer to see the order in progress. Next up is our inventory interface. This is for our back-end management to track all the inventory we're burning through on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. Then we have our alarming. We want to be able to see the alarms in our system, and we ask the students to set alarms on inventory levels. So we would know when specific items are getting low and need to be ordered. Then we have our trending. We want our restaurant owner to see where the company is trending from the operations side of things as well as revenue. And finally, navigation. This is, of course, where you navigate between the pages of the project. Finally, we provided UDTs, or user-defined types, to our students, and these act as a state machine. Each process—creating the burgers, fries, and shakes—has its own steps to go through to create that final product. And we wanted to make this part consistent across the project so everybody starts from a good baseline. Now, what would a project be without scope creep? We know in the real world that customers always come up with a new requirement before a project is finished. We let our students get to work, and then we reveal the twist. Each item has a price, and we ask them to sum the revenue over the orders and track this on the inventory management page. We also asked for a reset function for the revenue. And with that all behind us, Reese, would you like to walk us through the winning project?

16:05
Reese Tyson: Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for going over those project requirements. It's always good to have a little bit of background for what we're about to see. But let me pull up the winning project here. So this is the winning project that the Clovis Crush team has created. And you'll notice on the left-hand side over here, there are four primary main parts to this project. And these are the pages that I'm going to walk through initially here. So we're on the order interface page, right? And you can imagine this is where you'd maybe walk up to a kiosk. You may have done that at a fast food restaurant where you have kind of a self-service kiosk, so that was kind of the intent of this order interface. It is customer-facing, right? It's something that they're going to use. And so, of course, making it seamless and easy to use and all those types of things was very important. But you can see this Crush Cafe, as the Clovis Crush team has called their restaurant; you can have a burger, you can have fries, and you can have a shake. Of course, these are the project specifications that Mara just went through. And so we can absolutely add burgers, we can add fries, and we can add shakes to this order. Now, some of the things that I like about this are that you can add multiple burgers to this, and you get a subtotal right here on the right-hand side for each individual item, right? Additionally, we also have a total sale price that's being calculated in real time as well. If we were to drop this below, or I should say if we were to drop it to zero, the UI only allows you to add a burger rather than subtract it down to the negative, right? Obviously, ordering a negative burger doesn't make any sense. So that's a really nice added feature to just minimize the amount of error that the user could introduce to this system. Canceling out the order down here at the bottom is going to zero all of these items out, right? And we can start over. We'll go ahead and add one of each here. And once we've decided that, hey, this is what we want to order, we can absolutely start that order.

18:22
Reese Tyson: Now, when we start this order, the intent and the idea of the project specifications behind this was I want the end user to be able to watch the progress in real time, right? But we, of course, don't have a real piece of equipment creating this. And so the idea here was to create a state machine with those UDTs to be able to use as visualization for this product being made. So the Clovis Crush team did a really great job of showing that progress bar, right? If this item is in progress, here's the stage that it's in, and then we have a Let's Eat button here that, when we click it, is going to cancel out or close out that order once it's been finished, and it's going to be ready for that next customer. So those are some of the really nice things that I like. What we also wanted to do during this is talk about some of the things to consider, right? Some additional features to add in there, because some of you may be competing in the competition next year, just to give you an idea of maybe some of the things that you could include in that project. So let's go ahead, and I'll go ahead and add these. Really, I love this interface. I don't really have a ton of improvements to make; the team did a fantastic job, but on the start order page here, the order progress page, what I would probably do here just to add yet another item for visual enhancement here would be to add an icon or an image of placing a tomato on that burger, right? Placing that top bun, etc., rather than just the progress bar. The progress bar is great to be able to see that that item is in progress, in fact, but it would be nice to have the step of which we are seeing rather than just the text there. And that's the order interface. Simple, intuitive, and for that end user to use, which is, honestly, exactly what you want for that type of customer-facing screen.

20:25
Reese Tyson: Moving on to the inventory management. So the inventory management, of course, is where we can manage our inventory, just as the label says there. We also have the ability to look at the revenue of the products that we have created and how much money we've made. So some of the things that I like about this screen, right? We've incorporated icons here, not just text and labels, right? But we've reinforced that visually with icons as well so that we can not only read it but also visually see what we are increasing here. So we can absolutely increase the amount of inventory we have with these easy-to-use buttons here. We can also say we've got a huge order of a thousand containers, right? And it doesn't seem out of the picture for an actual restaurant. We can also type into this and hit enter, and that will update that value as well. So you aren't getting arthritis by mashing the button on the mouse a thousand times to increase that inventory. So some really nice features there, plenty of space, right, visually to see that there's separation between the revenue section, there's separation between the inventory section, it just visually separates those two different items. Some of the things that I would improve on this screen, right? Again, that's one of the things we want to talk about on this webinar. There's always room for improvement, but what I would do here is, and we haven't really talked about this yet, but there is an alarm set for if inventory goes below five, right? So cups should be an alarm right now. In fact, when we go to the next page over here, the alarms page, we should be able to see that there. But what I would do is I would add a visual indicator, maybe change the text color to red or the background color of that label to red or something of that sort just to indicate here that we are low, in fact, on that piece of inventory. So that's one thing. Another thing that I would do is add a little bit of padding up top here so it'll separate the inventory section, that border, from that top navigation bar, maybe even the same padding, distancing, and pixel width as what we see between these two inventory and revenue sections. Okay, so that is the inventory management section.

22:53
Reese Tyson: And then we have the alarms, and there we go. In fact, we do have a low cup inventory here. And so a couple of things that I like about this: obviously it's taking up the whole screen, right? We're using, and this was part of that project specification, we're using the alarm status table to build out this screen. And so a lot of this functionality is just built-in functionality. But the fact that we expanded the alarm status table component across that whole view is great, using up all that real estate, and, of course, we can acknowledge or interact with this alarm there as well. One of the things is, obviously, there's not a lot of room for improvement when it's literally just a whole component on one page, right? But one of the things that the Clovis Crush team did was add this clear time section or column to the table as well. So that's a really nice added feature just to be able to see when that alarm was cleared, when we have enough inventory right there on the alarm status table.

24:00
Reese Tyson: Moving over to trending. Obviously this is a way that we can see how the different inventories are trending, and that was part of the project specification to historicize the value of our inventory. And so you'll notice down at the bottom we have lids and we have cups inventory, right? So we're seeing that drop there from four dropping down to two when we put that order in; well, it was about five minutes ago. And so a couple of things that I like about this view, right? Once again, we're taking advantage of the full space of this view, right? Taking up all that real estate. And although that was a part of the project requirements, another thing that they did as well was change the names of the pen here from the default tag path to the specific kind of more human-readable name, right? Part of the project requirements was to initialize this power chart with lids and cups inventory when you open up the screen, but they went ahead and added, you know, more of a, like I said, human-readable name to these pens rather than just the tag name. So a lot of little things, right, that the Clovis Crush team did a really great job of, and that's really what kind of pushed them over the edge here. So that is the core of the project, right? There are a lot of other smaller project requirements in the designer, and we don't really have all the time in the world today to talk through every single detail that they did in the background. But next up, I want to talk about how this project was graded. And so for that, I'm going to switch back to our slides here and continue on to talk about this project from the judging side of things, right?

25:53
Reese Tyson: So how this was judged was once the teams completed the project, of course, over here at IA, we had a team of judges. I think there were six or seven of us judging different parts of this project. And so we got quite a wide variety of folks from different divisions and different backgrounds so that we tried to make it as complete of a judging process as possible here. And so what we were judging was, as you can see, the breakdown of the different categories here. So the order interface was weighted the heaviest at 20%. Obviously, we wanted to see a fast, intuitive, and user-friendly way to place and track orders. Inventory management came in at 15%. Of course, that was about giving the manager the ability to track and see the inventory. Trending and alarm both sat at 10%, focusing on the ability to visualize performance over time, flag problems quickly, and those types of things. And then design and color scheme, 10% for making things not just functional but also clean and visually cohesive. Mobile responsiveness was 5%, security and user roles were another 10%, and HMI operability and UI maneuverability were the rest. And this might kind of seem similar to design and color scheme, but this was more about systems, how smooth the system was, and how intuitive it was for that end user to use, how accessible it was, those types of things. And actually, I'll mention Mara is going to be talking about the design, color scheme, mobile-responsive security, and all the kind of the four last ones there. And she'll dive in a little bit more about what that means. What does HMI operability mean? What do "design" and "color scheme" mean? Just to give an idea of some of the best practices that we see out there in the wild. And then finally, the last one there, the twist, right? 10% dedicated to that surprise element. I like what you said there, Mara; there's never a project that doesn't have at least a little bit of scope creep, right? You get halfway through the project, and the end user's like, Hey, I want to add this or that or the other thing. So I wanted to add a little bit of that element to mimic the real world with that.

28:08
Reese Tyson: Using this grading rubric, right, our winning team, Clovis Crush, absolutely crushed it, if I can use that terrible pun, scoring a massive 24.5 out of 27. So that's not only a fantastic project that hit all the project requirements, right, but also they added a lot of personal touches throughout, which is really exactly what we love to see and why they took home the gold on this competition. So let's go ahead and take a closer look at how the team scored in each category here. Let's start with one of the more critical pieces of the project, right, the order interface. That's what the end user's going to see. As you can see, Clovis Crush, they nailed this portion 10 out of 10. All the core functionality was there: a clear and smooth ordering process and a nice touch with visualization of the food being made, kind of showing that process. They implemented the Let's Eat button to reset the order screen as it was requested in the project requirements tab, and the real-time cost updates changed based off of what that user was selecting. But where they really pushed ahead, right, the extra polish they added in here, they included images for the food, as you can see here on this GIF that's playing, right, burger, fries, and shake. This makes the UI a little bit more engaging. Inventory checks were actually baked into the ordering process, so the user couldn't order items that we didn't have inventory for. And this is actually something that I didn't show on that demo, but hopefully it shows here on the GIF if we can get back to it. But essentially, it prevents someone from ordering 1,000 burgers if we don't have the inventory for that, right? Maybe we only have 50 buns left. That user should not be able to order 1,000 burgers, right? And so that's something that they included inside of this UI there. So hopefully we'll see that here in a second. And then just overall, the interface was super clean. Oh, here's that pop-up, right? So there was a pop-up that said, Hey, you don't have enough inventory to make X amount of shakes that we had ordered. And so basically, it just took it off of the order there. But yeah, a really great seamless experience for that end user.

30:25
Reese Tyson: Moving on to inventory management now. Once again, it came in strong with a 10 out of 10. You'll start to notice the theme here. It's got core functionality. First, the team delivered an editable inventory system that lets users adjust quantities quickly and intuitively, right? That's the key to this page. And here's where they nailed the twist, right? Remember Mara talking about the twist that they had to add the revenue section to this page, right? They successfully added all the revenue items alongside the inventory system, keeping everything aligned visually as well as technically, right, between the sales and the stock perspective. And so some of the extra touches—I mentioned these in our demo, right? Icons that we added next to the inventory rows there on the table. Excellent use of grouping and borders, like we talked about. And everything here is really simple to use, right? That's what we're going for for a UI. Alarming, once again, 10 out of 10. They covered all the core functionality here. Alarms were set and visualized on each of the inventory tags, even though we only saw one of them on the demo. You can see a lot more of them here on a system that's been used a little bit more. You can interact with those alarms, right? The acknowledgement button wasn't disabled. The shelving button was, you had the ability to shelf alarms, all that good stuff. And then, of course, the entire alarm status table took up the entire view there. They also went above and beyond the basics with one really nice touch, right? That clear column, sorry, the clear time column that we talked about there. Just additional functionality to their project. Finally, trending. This was another 10% of the overall score. And here's what they got right in terms of core functionality: initializing with the cup and lid inventory levels on startup of this page. The power chart takes up the whole view, taking advantage of that real estate. And they have the ability to, as you can see on the GIF here, remove, add, and edit other trends that we are historicizing within the system. And then as for bonus points, right? Those additional features, I really appreciated them updating the pen name from the default tag path. And so now that we've kind of gone over the core functionality of the app, right? Mara, I'm going to hand it over to you to talk about some of the additional parts of the project and how they're graded and why they're graded, et cetera. So I'm giving you mouse and keyboard control, and the floor is yours.

33:04
Mara Pillott: All right, thank you, Reese. Wow, there were some features in there that I didn't even see when I was judging. Excellent job, Clovis Crush. Next up, we're going to talk about design and color scheme. This was worth 10% of the score, and our winning team scored high again with a 9 of 10. User experience is really key in any project. Users will often judge your project by how it looks over how it functions, and they can also get lost and frustrated if information is not clear. Good design helps your users understand the interface intuitively. So Reese already showed us the user interface. He showed us that it's very functional, and it's also very user-intuitive. This section of judging is going to focus on our use of color, graphics, and layouts. So starting with the core functionality, in our judging rubric, we first looked at overall aesthetics, and then we looked for any logos or branding. Color choices are subjective, but we were looking for consistency in our color scheme and the use of branding. We also looked for any intentional design, such as the use of white spaces, alignment in the layout, and readable fonts. For the additional features and highest scores, we looked for things like functional colors, such as showing green for devices that are on. We also looked for icons, and these can be helpful for accessibility, or tool tips can help users understand the interface even better. We also recommend style classes because they help you create a consistent look and feel, and they make your project maintenance easier.

34:52
Mara Pillott: Let's take a look at this overall design. So notice we're looking at all four screens together, and we see a cohesive color scheme. These screens clearly belong to the same project. Users are going to feel very, very oriented and familiar in here. So consistency not only helps set your brand, but it also keeps your users feeling oriented. What else are we seeing here? We're seeing the use of branding and color. We've got our Crush Cafe logo, and these navigation menu icons follow the logo color scheme. We're also seeing some nice white fonts that contrast nicely with that dark blue background. Next up in our core requirements was this intentional design. So in addition to colors and branding, we are seeing some good use of alignment and spacing throughout the project. The inventory screen is laid out in a tabular format, and we've got larger fonts showing our categories. So we recommend no more than two or three font variations and sizes, and this project does a good job with that, just reserving those larger fonts where we want to draw the eye. Reese already mentioned we've got some nice grid lines. Here we've got some nice separation and spacing. We also, under our additional features, have those functional colors and the icons. We've got a minus quantity icon, and that's red, and the add quantity icon is green. So those colors are pretty intuitive overall, but the icons also lead to some accessibility. So a colorblind user, and this is more common than you might think—red-green colorblindness is very common. And unfortunately, we see a lot of red and green out there in industry. So we've got our minus sign icon and our plus sign icon, and that's going to help users know immediately what these buttons do. We also have our food items represented by pictures, so it's pretty easy to see what those are. So overall, this scored very high. It covered all requirements and some of the additional features. Some other things they might have used would have been tooltips. That can be helpful in that if users hover over a button, they get some more information. This user interface was already intuitive. We didn't feel that more tooltips were necessary. One improvement could have been made by using style classes more. So every view here has that light blue color hard-coded, and your restaurant owner could show up tomorrow and say, Hey, designers, I would like a different shade of blue. And our designers would have had to go through every view and replace that hard-coded shade. So just style classes here would have made that project more maintainable.

37:49
Mara Pillott: So next up on the judging menu, we have mobile responsiveness. Now, this only counted for 5% of the overall score, but don't get the idea that it's not important. We are seeing more and more that very few real-world projects are designed for only one screen size. So it's really best that you keep responsiveness in mind from the beginning of project design. Again, we scored 10 out of 10 here, and we see that this project used flex containers. So those automatically wrap and resize content. Another approach would be to use breakpoints. Breakpoints let you create, like, a large, small, and medium version of your screens, and then you can show different versions as you resize. So for the core functionality, we just asked that the screens resize on a mobile view, and the project meets that requirement; everything's resizing nicely. Under additional features, one thing we asked was that the screens still be easy to use. So if I got down to a smaller screen, my buttons would still be usable. Everything's still really easy to use, so that met that requirement. We also asked for wrapping where needed. So this design didn't require any wrapping, but they did add in a feature that we didn't even mention in the judging rubric. So notice if I shrink this down, that side navigation menu is going to disappear, and I get an icon. If I click on that icon, I get the menu, and then I can go ahead and hide that menu again. So this really saves space when you have those smaller screens. It's also user-intuitive because we see a lot of this out there in applications. So the project required role-based security, and that made up 10% of the score. Now our team didn't supply all the passwords, so our judges were not able to test that functionality, and they just—we were missing some of the score. So we scored a 5 out of 10 here, but we were able to get into the designer and confirm that all of the functionality was present.

40:00
Mara Pillott: So let's take a look at the core functionality in the designer. So not every screen is meant for every user. And in this project, we don't want our customers to see the inventory, trending or alarming, and only the admins should be able to see our inventory. So the team defined the three roles, the administrator, customer, and operator, and they applied the permissions correctly. So here they're using view-level permissions, and that's a good solution. So we see the inventory management view here in the designer, and we see that this can only be opened by an administrator. Now that would be enough security, but they did a little more here. You can also disable or hide things. So sometimes we really don't want users to know that there are screens they can't get to, so we hide them. Other times we can, we might want to display things, but we might want to make those things read-only for everybody unless they have a certain role. In that case, we might disable editing. So in this case, if we're looking at their designer, they went ahead and they took the menu items, those navigation menu items, and they only made them visible to users in a certain role. So customers wouldn't even have known that those screens that they can't get to existed. All right, the last judging category was the twist, and this counted for 10%. Like I said, we didn't throw this in just to be tricky. We've had experience. We know customers always have some new requirements along the way. So it's really best that during your design process, you think of areas where you might need to be flexible or extend your design later. And this is why we are always encouraging that you break code down into functions, that you use reusable objects like reusable views, and we also encourage UDTs, or user-defined types, because a change could be reflected in all instances of that UDT. So this team scored max points because not only did they accurately track the revenue, but they threw in an additional feature. We only asked for total revenue, but the project delivered revenue broken down by item. So, we've been, in our experience, you're often on tight deadlines, you want time for extras, but sometimes if you're anticipating what your customer needs next, it's going to save you time in the long run. And finally, this design just continued to blend in nicely with the rest of the good design practices on the inventory page. So that, I believe, concludes our judging. I'm going to pass this back over to Reese.

42:42
Reese Tyson: Perfect. Yeah, thanks, Mara. The feature that they added in there for the color blindness, or when you talked about that, is something that resonates quite well with me. I'm actually one of the 4% of people in the statistic that have color blindness. And so adding in those additional visual elements, not only the icons but also textually and color-wise, is an important thing to do, especially if it's a project that I'm working on. But anyways, that'll conclude a kind of a rundown of the Student Build-a-Thon project. I honestly hope you enjoyed it as much as we did and learned some of the useful things along the way. We are planning on doing this every year. So spread the word; don't miss out on the Student Build-a-Thon next year. Additionally, if you maybe missed out on this or didn't realize this was going on until maybe today or maybe a month later, you can go and check out the Ignition Exchange. The Ignition Exchange is a place where not only folks here internally at Inductive Automation upload resources, but also folks across our community upload resources. And you can find the Student Build-a-Thon project, all the specifications, the judging criteria, the rubric, the UDTs, and everything that the students received at the start of this challenge if you want to go there and download it and challenge yourself.

44:07
Reese Tyson: So with that, we are going to get into Q&A here, I guess pretty soon, but before we answer your questions there, we have been talking about and showcasing Ignition this whole time. And so I want to invite you to download a free trial today and see it for yourself. It honestly only takes about three minutes to download and install. So if you start downloading it now, you'll definitely be able to use it before the webinar is over, right? And then you can also use that download and installation in trial mode for as long as you want. And while I'm thinking about it, I'm going to also plug Maker Edition here as well. So Maker Edition is an edition of Ignition. It's a free offering of Ignition that is used for kind of the home DIYers, folks that like to play around with technology, right? So you have, with a free account with Inductive Automation, free licenses that you can use for Maker Edition, right? And so if you want to do some home automation, if you want to, like myself, I use it to track budget things and stuff like that, right? You can absolutely use it for your home use as well there. So definitely check that out. And if you want to learn more about Ignition and how to build things within the platform, check out Inductive University, which is our free training website with hundreds, literally hundreds—I think there are over 800—of educational videos. So you can learn Ignition step-by-step at your own pace there, inductiveuniversity.com. And there's also a comprehensive online user manual as well. You can reference it anytime. Again, all this is free. No matter what your experience level is with Ignition, there's of course always more to learn, right? So you can absolutely do that at no cost with these resources.

45:56
Reese Tyson: I also want to talk about the 2025 Community Conference. This is being, this will be between September 16th and 18th of this year at our new home venue, the SAFE, S-A-F-E, it's an acronym, the SAFE Credit Union Convention Center in Sacramento, California. The website is up, and you can go and register at icc.inductiveautomation.com and sign up. You could sign up to be an exhibitor, see the schedule, learn about lodging, transportation, hotels in the area, food around the area, et cetera. So ICC is always a really fun, amazing experience where the greatest minds in Inductive Automation, as well as in the community, get together and demonstrate innovative projects, network with each other, chat with folks, and have a good time. And actually, talking about chatting with folks, you'll also have a chance to meet the students from the winning team of the Student Build-a-Thon. We'll also be featuring them during the conference. So that'll be really exciting, but we're just really pumped for this year's ICC. We honestly think it's going to be the best one yet. So please go and check out that website, of course after the webinar. Right now, pay attention here; we're not quite done. For those of you who are outside of North America, we have a network of international ignition distributors who provide business development opportunities, sales, and technical support in your own language and time zone. So if you want to learn more about the distributor in your region, please visit their website listed here on the screen. Or you could also contact our international distribution manager, Yegor Karnaukhov. You can see his email down there at the bottom. And if you'd like to speak with one of our account representatives at our headquarters in California, please call (800) 266-7798. We also have an office in Australia. If you want to reach them, definitely call the number that you see down there at the bottom of the screen, 1300 10 8088.

48:05
Reese Tyson: Now let's get to some questions that have come into the chat here. So if you haven't asked a question and you have a question, we want to answer all of those here today, especially if it's about the Student Build-a-Thon, but there are a couple other questions to walk through from folks that have asked questions when they registered. So I have a question here from Dave. He says, I have a unique holistic indirect fluid management program for steam boilers but need an integrator or someone to take it to an automated business-to-business project. And so one of the things I would say to you, Dave, is although this doesn't really relate to Student Build-a-Thon, I still want to answer this question: we have a lot of integrators, over 4,000 in our program, and you can go to our website, I believe it's under resources at the top, and you can find an integrator that's near you, filter by experience in different areas, et cetera. Mara or Annabelle, do you guys have any questions that you'd like to answer that have been coming into this chat?

49:15
Annabelle Haley: Yeah, I see a question that someone asked. It looks like Clive asked, Do I have to be a university student to participate? So that's a really good question. Just to clarify, you don't have to be a university student. As we went through today, it was actually a community college student team that won the event. So you don't need to belong to a four-year university, but you do need to be actively enrolled in an educational organization, like a school. This year, it was limited to the United States, but we are hoping to expand that in future years, so keep an eye out for those requirements as they come through.

49:51
Reese Tyson: Perfect. And it looks like there's another one here from Marissa. She asks if this recording will be available for download. Absolutely. All of these webinars that we host are available. In fact, I think that if you have registered for this, which if you're on this, you've registered for it, I believe the link for that will be sent out to all of those emails as well. But usually it takes a day or two for that to be processed and uploaded, but that would certainly be available there. Ashok asks, I apologize if I pronounced that name wrong. He would like to know how to integrate the code in the tag button. And so I think what you're referencing there, it sounds like you might've been a participant in the competition. And it looks like you were asking about how to integrate the writing of value from the button on a button click to the tag and back, right? And that was most likely done, at least the intent was for it to be done with a tag, writing to that tag value on the tag value on the—probably a script would be the best use case there. So on the click of a button, write to that script, or write a script to write to that tag and update that value. So that would probably be what you would want to do there, but you could also check out our docs as well as our Inductive University. And there are a couple of different examples of how to go about doing that, actually, that exact function on those different resources. Annabelle, it looks like there's one from Donnie here. I think you'd be best to answer this one. When do the specifications for that competition usually go out?

51:42
Annabelle Haley: Yeah, that's a great question, Donnie. So the actual project requirements and the specifications, they were released only 72 hours before the project was due. So that kind of goes into, like, the timed competition element of it. We're still finalizing if we want to do that 72-hour timeframe again, because this was our first year, and we're trying to make it greater than ever for next year, making sure everyone feels like it was successful and has a great time. So you'll see more information about it probably late this year. We had it in April, so we're probably going to try to finalize some things late this year or early next year, and we'll give you an idea of the timeframe when the specifications would go out, but you do need to sign up. Once that signup link is open, you'll want to make sure you sign up so then you receive the specifications. We'll also give you some skills to practice and just kind of set you up for success prior to the event going live.

52:40
Reese Tyson: Perfect. It looks like there is possibly another question for you, Annabelle. See if you can answer this. Some folks have a question about what the difference is between Maker Edition. I know I mentioned that earlier, right? And you have free license for a kind of home DIY automation project type of application. What's the difference between that and a free educational admission license that you mentioned earlier in the presentation?

53:07
Annabelle Haley: Yes, that's a good question that I receive a lot. So Maker Edition is our free version for home automation projects. This is really meant for personal education, like for you to teach yourself. It only comes with, I believe, three activations, and it only comes with a specific set of modules. So there are some limitations there. Now the free educational license—this is something that you would talk to me about, and I would donate it to you. It would run for that year's timeframe, but there are no limitations on what modules you could have or how many activations you could have. We have some schools with big labs set up, and they have, like, over a hundred activations. So there are not really any limitations there, and that's more for formal educational use. So if you or someone you know is maybe using the Maker Edition for formal educational uses, please feel free to reach out, and we can get you set up with that actual educational license just so you don't need to contend with the limitations of the Maker Edition.

54:05
Reese Tyson: Perfect. Yeah, and I'll throw this one back to you. Annabelle, Donnie had a follow-up. He says, "That's great," talking about when the specifications come out for the competition, but he asks, "Where do we sign up, and can we do it today?"

54:19
Annabelle Haley: Oh yes, so the signup link will not be available yet until probably at the end of the year or early next year, at least after ICC, I would say. When there's a signup link, we'll make sure we post it on LinkedIn. We'll probably send something out in the newsletter and make sure everyone's aware of it. But no, you can't sign up quite yet. It'll probably be somewhere around April next year.

54:41
Reese Tyson: Yeah, and Donnie, I believe what I would do if I were you is just follow us on social media. We have it on pretty much every platform. And I believe since you signed up for this webinar, your email will be on our newsletter. And so there'll most likely be something going out in there as well via email for that signup information when the time comes.

55:05
Annabelle Haley: And Donnie, if you're interested, you can always reach out to me at that edengagement@inductiveautomation.com. Yeah, it looks like you asked again. What about the use of Ignition for school use? Feel free to reach out to me. I could actually just record your email, and I'll reach out to you. How about that? I'll reach out to you, and we can talk a little bit more about how you want to use Ignition and prepare you for the competition.

55:28
Reese Tyson: I think that would probably be the best, Annabelle. Perfect. There is another question here from Clive. You had an earlier question, but we got another one for you. Would there ever be a competition for business engineers or DIY-type contests? Mara, do you want to answer that one? I know you talked about the Build-a-Thon and related it to the Student Build-a-Thon a little bit earlier.

55:52
Mara Pillott: Sure, I can handle that. So pretty quick here, you'll find this information on our website again. We will have the Build-a-Thon challenge. So I recommend you check that out. It is too late to enter now, but the two winners of that challenge, and that's a series of, I would say, puzzles and Inductive Automation knowledge. The two winners of that challenge go to Build-a-Thon Live at the ICC. So that would really cover anybody who's an integrator or business engineer. Now, as far as do-it-yourself and Maker Edition, we don't have a challenge specifically for that, but that's a really good idea. If you do have Maker projects, I'd suggest sending those over to us because we love to highlight those on LinkedIn and other social media.

56:44
Reese Tyson: Perfect, yeah. And I'll just—I think that is a really cool idea, a DIY-type contest. Yeah, maybe we'll have to take that back and see what that could look like. Maybe the Student Build-a-Thon here evolved out of the main Build-a-Thon that we've created for integrators and businesses. So maybe there's another step that we can take for Maker Edition. I think that would be a cool addition there. So appreciate that feedback, Clive. And with that, it looks like we're at the top of the hour. So thank you so much for attending today. And definitely excited to see where Student Build-a-Thon takes us next year. Our next webinar will be on July 31st. Until then, you can connect with us on all of our socials, which you can see here, and subscribe to our newsfeed, our weekly emails. You can also stay up to date through our blogs. We have case studies and much more on inductiveautomation.com on our website. And thanks so much for joining us today, and I hope you have a great rest of your day and rest of your week.