Most capstone projects live in a folder and never ship. ERKADO was different — not because we planned it that way, but because the problem the team was solving was real enough that we couldn't afford to let it be theoretical.
The Problem
Farmers in Tagum City selling crops face a persistent information gap. Middlemen set prices. Farmers rarely know the going market rate. The result: unfair trades, repeated across every harvest, season after season.
ERKADO — our capstone project — was a mobile application designed to close that gap. A team of four, building something that was supposed to actually help actual people.
What We Built
The app gave farmers access to real-time price references, trade records, and a simplified way to connect with buyers. The goal was fairness through transparency: if you know what your crop is worth today, you're harder to lowball.
The team of four had clear roles across the mobile app, web app, server work, documentation, and presentation requirements. My contribution centered on implementation support, testing, user manual documentation, and thesis writing support, turning our development process into conference-ready and submission-ready prose: problem statements, methodology sections, test plans, and user-facing documentation.
The Conferences
We submitted to two conferences in 2024.
SMCTI 2nd International Multidisciplinary Research Conference — our home institution's research event. We came away with:
- 1st Place Best Research Paper
- 1st Place Best in Poster Presentation
- 3rd Place Best in Oral Presentation
Mindanao Conference for Information Technology Students (MCITS) — a regional conference for IT students across Mindanao. Results:
- 2nd Place Research Paper
- 2nd Place Research Exhibit
Five awards across two conferences for a project that started as a requirement for graduation. It meant something.
What I Took From It
Research taught me to defend my decisions. In development, you can ship something that half-works and patch it later. In an oral presentation in front of a panel, you explain every architectural choice and methodology decision to people who will push back.
That pressure sharpened how I think about technical communication. Now when I write code, I think about how I'd explain it to someone who doesn't share my assumptions.
The other thing: problems worth solving exist outside of tech. ERKADO was built for farmers, not developers. The measure of whether it worked wasn't test coverage — it was whether a farmer in Tagum City could use it to get a fair price for their crop.
That perspective hasn't left me.
What's Next for ERKADO
The research is published. Whether the application gets further development depends on stakeholders beyond our team. But the process — from problem identification through development through conference presentation — is the most complete product lifecycle I've gone through.
Everything I've built since has been better for it.