EarthCheck | Devpost

Inspiration

Everyday Earth is being negatively impacted from the effects of pollution, power-plant emissions, climate change, and other daunting elements. These issues may seem out of our hands and might make us tempted to give in to trying to reduce their impact. However, there are actions that we can do in our everyday lives that can soften the negative impacts on our precious Earth. Our inspiration for EarthCheck comes from this exact fact. We want to help people realize that they can make a difference in the world in their daily lives.

What it does

EarthCheck is an achievement based game where users gain points when they do tasks that positively impact the environment.The tasks that are listed in our app have been research proven to affect Earth and are split up into 6 different categories: shopping, personal, gardening, technology, transportation, and household. When a user completes a task they simply check it off on the checklist and gain points. The points for each task was determined on the difficulty to include it in everyday life. For example, turning off your computer is pretty easy to do whereas volunteer for a green org might be a bit more difficult. The tasks reset everyday so users can continue to track actions daily. Users can also click on a certain task to learn more on why that task is beneficial. We also have a leaderboard system in order to incentivize users to do more tasks often.

How we built it

After a few hours of wireframing, conceptualizing new features, and creating tasks, we divided ourselves into 2 frontend, 1 backend, and 1 UI/UX designer and started working. Sumeet worked on creating the Firebase/Google Cloud Server backend, Justin and Steven worked on building the frontend of the app using React Native, Node.js, and Ant Design Component Library, and Thang designed the UI/UX using Figma.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge we had was implementing the navigation bar in react-native. This was difficult because the syntax of react-native is new and unfamiliar to us. In addition, working on this project virtually was not as convenient as being in-person, but we managed to communicate well throughout the entire hackathon.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud that we were able to make a full stack mobile application application like EarthCheck in such a short amount of time. EarthCheck combines Firebase on our backend with an intuitive user interface on our frontend. We believe that EarthCheck could easily be an application by people in order to reduce the harmful impact that humans are making on the environment. Our application is simple for anyone to use; this makes it user friendly for people of all ages to contribute to saving the planet.

What's more, we're proud of how we were able to create this app even though it was our first time using react-native. We had to read through lots of documentation to make our finished product.

We're also proud of how well we adapted to a virtual hackathon. Our team stayed in strong communication throughout the hackathon, constantly staying on both Discord and Facebook Messenger. Coupled with Git for version control, we were able to work efficiently and effectively, despite the fact that we were in separate locations.

What we learned

We utilized a lot of new technology to create EarthCheck and we all learned a lot from working with so much of it.

To reiterate, we utilized react-native to make our mobile application compatible for both iOS and Android. We additionally called several APIs including Firebase. Finally, the whole server was tied together with a Node.js and Firebase backend.

On the client side, we designed our application first with Figma. The application was built using HTML, CSS, and Javascript with react-native being utilized as the front end framework. We utilized Ant Design Component Library to beautify our application.

The new technologies that went into this application meant that this entire project was a constant learning process for all four of us. We had a lot of fun facing the numerous challenges that were thrown at us and we were not scared to get knee deep into documentation.

What's next for EarthCheck

Moving forward, we would love to expand the ways that users can contribute to helping the environment. At the moment, we have 34+ different activities that users can do to save the planet. Additionally, we would love to have more users on our application in order to decrease the rate at which we are harming the environment. We could possibly achieve this by implementing a friend system where users can compete against people they know; this would make the application more personal.

We also believe that we can reach out to companies to sponsor our application by giving users prizes for being in the top 3, 5, 10, etc. This would create a greater incentive for people to complete more tasks.