Climate Buddy

Educating people about climate change through an interactive role-playing game, website and AR/VR experiences.

Comment

The goals that we tackled with our application were *Goal 4: Quality Education and Goal 13: Climate Action! *

Inspiration

In today's world, a lot of people are either misinformed or underinformed on topics such as climate change and global warming. This is especially true for students growing up in Canada's education system where students don't learn about the impact on the environment of their actions until the grade 11 or grade 12 science courses. Even then the current educational systems are heavy on theory, light on real-life experiences (after but also before COVID). Thus for our project, we took it upon ourselves to educate the younger children about climate change! We did so using an engaging website that can help the students learn by doing rather than hearing,

What it does

Climate buddy is a website that utilizes modern technologies such as VR, as well as voice Inputs to create an engaging learning environment. In addition, it has a very user-friendly, seamless UI to make the learning process less daunting for children and persons with disabilities.

How we built it

We split the work into multiple roles: Aidan was working on the user interface using HTML, CSS, Javascript, he is also responsible for VR development; while Shrey developed the backend, deployed the website, and made a game with VoiceFlow; Hao was responsible for researching the topic, gathering materials, and preparing documents for the team. We did our own part simultaneously. After that, we had a meeting after every 4 hours to update, compare, and integrate the code, then assigned the new tasks ultimately.

Challenges we ran into

Working virtually was tougher than we thought it would have been as there is an obvious barrier for communication, exchanging ideas as well as the feeling of a community. With the time constraint and of course the sleep deprivation, we found it relatively stressful to make a large application in such a short amount of time.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We successfully developed and launched a fully functional website with user-friendly UI, cross-platform. We also managed to create an advanced educational game to teach users about climate action which at the beginning of this hackathon none of us know how to do!!

What we learned

The most important thing we have learned is how to effectively time manage the tasks and collaborate with other teammates. We were able to do this by creating short and concise tasks for our team to work on for 4 hours before coming back to regroup.

In terms of technical skills, we've also honed our web development skillset, including HTML, CSS, Javascript, Bootstrap for the front-end, for the back-end we use Node.js, Express.js. We also learned game development with VR, Voice input technology.

What's next for Climate Buddy

We believe that Climate Buddy has the potential to be the go-to platform for education regarding climate change. Though they're just a few things that we believe that we must do before it can reach that level. These things are working on the website a little more as well as coming up with a few other games for users to play and interact with. We also hope to bring more content to our website in terms of informative news articles. We would also love to implement some interactive graphs for users to interact with so that they can understand how the climate on earth has been over the past centuries.

Built With

Share this project:

Updates