Compear | Devpost

Inspiration

A lot of people want to eat greener but for a lot us, the problem is not knowing how to do so in a simple way. Furthermore, we don't even know the environmental impact of the choices we make. For example look at almonds. It wouldn't seem like it but these little devils are huge environmental hassles, taking around 20 gallons of water to grow just a handful of them. Not knowing the impact of what we buy is what inspired us to start working on this.

What it does

Compear allows users to create a grocery list and then it informs them on the environmental impact of their choices. This allows users to make informed decisions and put their money into greener products. Enormous greenhouse gases are produced in order to feed the planet and that's incredibly hard to change. Our app doesn't change the world which might be difficult for any app to do. Our app only helps with changing the minds and allowing people to be smart when they shop. The benefit of our app is that it's a very simple change to everyone's lifestyle that can help to slowly and steady reduce the impact food has on the planet. Compear allows users to compare products and pick alternatives to the food they buy that provides them less impactful products as well.

How we built it

Being all new to mobile development, none of us were able to build this into a fulling working app. So for this project, we relied heavily on what we do know; design and prototyping. Using framer, we build a somewhat working prototype of our idea and were able to create something that illustrates the capabilities of Compear. Using framer, we used our knowledge of UI to build something that could be a real and working app.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge we ran into was definitely making everything work. Originally, we did want to make an app but lacking that knowledge meant we ended up just having to build it in framer. Then, we built the UI and made the prototype work as well as we could. The prototype had many issues simply because our group didn't know how framer worked and we even had to utilize React at times which we didn't know.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud of finishing our very first hackathon and getting everything to work as well as it did. We've learned a lot about prototyping and how framer works, alongside UI and design in general. We're also really proud of how well we've worked as a team and overcame all our struggles together and found ways to make everything work and split up the tasks. We're also pretty proud of the final product we've made and how it looks and it's overall design.

What we learned

We've learned a lot about how to design an app and how they should look, along with how to manage UI. Prototyping was also something we learnt a lot. This was our first time using framer so we learnt a lot about prototyping apps and how to make them work. Furthermore, this was our first hackathon project so we learnt a lot about hackathons in general. We learned what we should expect from hackathons and how to actually participate in them.

What's next for Compear

The next step for Compear is to build the full database of all the different foods and their respective environmental impacts. After the database is built, then we move onto developing the app fully. The thing we have right now is a prototype since none of us knew how to code this full working app.