Cura Earth

Inspiration

We often feel lost or hopeless in regards to environmental action. When there’s so many possible small actions to take, it can feel as though each individual action is too insignificant yet the whole shebang is too overwhelming. Our web application aims to reduce the analysis paralysis that comes with partaking in environmental action by deciding on planet-friendly activities for each user.

What it does

Our web application generates ideas for environmental action based on users’ input of how much disposable time they have, encouraging them to partake in an activity feasible for their current situations. The user simply chooses how much time they wish to dedicate towards environmental betterment, and the application randomly generates a possible activity from a database.

How it’s built

Our web application was wire-framed and prototyped in Figma. The application was developed using React.

Challenges

Our team had little experience working with the technologies used in this project. We each spent time wrangling with components in React, styling in CSS and/or data-types in Javascript. Through consolidating online resources along with trial-and-error, we eventually translated the Javascript elements into React and developed the project into what it is now.

What We Learned

Through this project, team members gained a deeper understanding and developed a higher level of proficiency in React. Team members also gained a better understanding of version control tools, in this case, GitHub was used. We definitely improved our communication and teamwork skills. We divided the tasks to be completed by each person and when someone completed their task, they would inform everyone of what they completed and effectively communicate what they would be working on next.

Accomplishments

We’re proud to have created the initial parts to a solution relevant to a huge global issue (the climate crisis) while learning about new technologies. As students that are relatively new to the field of technology, there is a lot to be proud of by completing this hackathon. Firstly, we were able to create well designed drafts of the website on Figma. This aided the process for the front-end development because we had something to refer to while coding. In this hackathon, we learned a lot about GitHub such as pushing, pulling, and fetching, and this project was the first time we were able to successfully use GitHub as a tool to collaboratively code. Finally, we were able to complete a prototype of the website and host it on GitHub pages. Though there is much that we initially wanted to add (listed in the “What’s Next” section), we were able to complete this prototype to capture the spirit of what Cura Earth is supposed to do. OUr website contains a simple demonstration of how Cura Earth is able to inspire people to perform environmental action. We were proud that we were able to give functionality to the website so that it would give examples of activities that are environmentally friendly. Most of our members had little experience using React.js before this hackathon, so we are proud of what we were able to accomplish.

What’s next

Given more time, we would like to refine the user interface and expand our database of Earth-oriented activities. A future step to improve the user interface would be to improve the rendering of the website across screens of different sizes. We noticed that when our website is displayed on large monitors, the placement of some of the elements is off. We would try to fix this by revising the CSS styling of our elements, mainly the positioning attributes. A next step for the functionality of the website would be to create a generator that would randomly generate a task depending on the time chosen. We would like to have a database containing all the possible options. We would have all the data in an API and we would fetch the data using JavaScript.

Additionally, if we were to carry out Cura Earth as a long term project, it would be cool to have users create accounts. Members of Cura Earth would have many more features available to them such as gaining points for completing tasks, rewards for completing tasks, task history, and a feature to share images and progress with other members of the Cura Earth community.

Built With

• figma
• jsx
• react