ZooVenture

Gamifies the zoo experience to increase visitor engagement and learning of conservation messages.

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Inspiration

  • Problem: As a zookeeper, I often observed zoo guests rushing through exhibits too quickly to see and appreciate the animals, or read the educational signage to learn conservation messages. Also, some guests walk around the zoo paying more attention to their phone than appreciating the zoo.
  • Importance: People need to be educated about conservation issues to understand the importance, and thus care about the issues to want to take action to solve them.
  • Solution: Gamify the zoo experience with a mobile app. Encourages guest engagement; increase animal observation and reading educational signage to learn natural history and conservation messages.

What it does

  • As guests walk around the zoo and engage in exhibits, they earn points and badges to win prizes (membership, animal encounter, gift shop items, etc.) Results in guests caring more about conservation issues, leading them to take actions to solve problems.

How we built it

  • This app seeks to partner with local zoos to help create a more interactive experience to raise awareness to animals and conservation issues. The app utilizes a custom splash screen, recycler view list of specific endangered animals to select. Once a user selects the animal with an on click listener, a detail activity starts that kicks off queries from Firebase real time database. Firebase data about the animals is in json and the app pulls each specific characteristic of the animal into the detail activities views. The detail activity contains a nested layout of an image of the animal and geographic range, and text views for an animal’s habitat, name, and threats.

Challenges we ran into

  • IUCN Red List of Threatened Species API requires permission to use, obtained by applying well in advance with a detailed project proposal for approval. We did not have time for this at a hackathon, so we created a Firebase database by hand to pull the data from. However, in production, we would use the API instead to ensure the most updated information.
  • Tensor flow nightly not working
  • Recycler View not displaying list of animals
  • Custom images not sized or displaying correctly
  • Bottom app bar icons not working correctly
  • Recycler View Adapter not passing data correctly
  • Android x dependencies conflicting with tensor flow

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • Learned a lot of new things (see below), especially learning Firebase.
  • Utilized our specialized knowledge of zookeeping to create an app that fits the needs of zoos.

What we learned

  • Web dev teammates learned about Android development and design.
  • Non-zookeeper teammates learned about the conservation needs of zoos and the importance of guest engagement.
  • How to set up and use Firebase real time database.
  • Material Design.
  • Tensorflow.

What's next for ZooVenture

  • Scalable: Customized for any zoo for their own collection. Expand functions as needed/desired.
  • When viewing an animal at the zoo, pull up the animal in the app for more information and answer quiz questions about the animal to earn points/badges. Info can be learned by observing the animal and reading the educational signage.
  • Can implement social media aspect: Like and share photos of animals you see at the zoo with people posting pics from other zoos also using the app.
  • Geofencing (and Street View features available for Dallas Zoo): App detects when user is near a particular animal exhibit and info about that animal will pop up.
  • Using Tensorflow and Machine Learning to identify animals by viewing them through the phone's camera. Feature already partially implemented.

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