Bee Aware | Devpost

Front Page Sign in Screen
Home Garden Visualization and Goals
Home Garden Map
Adding to Your Home Garden
Final Donation Screen to Support Local Organizations

Inspiration

Bees are so important to the health of our ecosystems. There are a few main issues that lead are currently leading to the decline of the bee population. Some of these issues include rapid urbanization, habitat loss, intensification of agriculture, pesticide use, herbicide use, vulnerability to disease, lack of biodiversity, lack of pollen supply, and colony collapse disorder. Of these, our project attempts to tackle the issue of a lack of a pollen supply for bees to survive, all while raising awareness and educating users of the consequences of a declining bee population. Bees are extremely important for plant pollination, food security, and maintaining the health of our ecosystems. For reference, pollinators affect 35% of the world's crop production. Additionally, 66% of the crop plants that feed the world rely on pollinators to produce food.

What it does

Our project has three main goals.

First of all, our goal is to increase the number of home gardens. Home gardens are extremely important to increasing the pollen supply so that bees have a higher survival rate. They are better able to travel from location to location with the presence of more home gardens and local flora. In a way, it provides bees a quick pollen stop on their journey. Our app allows users to create cute cartoon visuals of home gardens, that we designed ourselves through Adobe Illustrator. Additionally, they will be able to view other home gardens in the local area so that they are able to see the impact that others are making, in addition to one's own efforts.

Secondly, we plan on partnering with local florists and apiarists. With local florists' support, we are able to use local flora for our gardens, since foreign plants can harm local ecosystems. Additionally, local apiarists would be able to provide locally sourced honey.

Lastly, we are hoping to raise awareness in regards to the consequences of a declining bee population. The lack of pollen sources due to habitat destruction is a large part of why bee populations are in a serious decline. Especially in large urban cities, like Los Angeles, bees have to make longer trips at longer distances without access to pollen. To help them out, we hope to encourage all to start their own home gardens!

How we built it

We used google cloud platform as a means to accomplish our web services on the back-end. We built it using node.js, html, and css. On the front-end, we used adobe illustrator and procreate to help draw designs, logos, custom art, and some stock photos used off the web.

Challenges we ran into

One of the unfortunate challenges was not having one of our laptops working the first day but we made do with a pair programming. We had a hard time finishing the back-end part. We made the databases and the thought process in helping retrieve and store data but weren't able to finish the backend codebase. Initially we were using google cloud api but found out later that it was deprecated and so switched to another means google cloud datastore api but were not able to finish. It was our first time using google cloud platform so learning how to set everything up and learning how to connect the various parts took quite some time. Our various skills limited some of our access to drawing a solution to our vertical but we made do with our skillset and created something practical. In addition three of us were first time hackers at a hackathon and two of us had no background in computer science at all. Despite our challenges we feel proud of what we were able to create during our time here.

What we learned

We learned a little more about back-end databases, and working with Javascript. In terms of working as a team we learned communication is important as well as managing our sleep schedule a bit better.