BeSus

Inspiration

We started by thinking about how we could harness people’s innate competitive nature to encourage more sustainable actions within a community. This concept is outlined in research here that we learned about at Professor Johnson's presentation on Friday night: Comparing your house to your neighbors' can lead to dissatisfaction

What it does

Based on our research, we decided to design a social media app that would track a user’s daily environmentally sustainable decisions and allow them to share these accomplishments across a community of users on the app. We added other features to encourage sustainability including providing local sustainable businesses with location tags. Users gain points for completing certain eco-friendly tasks and can see a daily leaderboard of their friends to encourage friendly competition.

How we built it

We utilized Figma to envision the graphics of our app. We created a prototype of the app using this interface design tool. Using the Eclipse workspace, we wrote a project in Java to demonstrate simple interactions with a user. We began to write this code by thinking about what data structures we would utilize to store data for individual users. We created a user class which had variables for name, number of friends, list of friends, and score. To create the list of a person’s friends, we made a LinkedList of users.

Challenges we ran into

BigRed//Hacks was our first hackathon, so we had to continually define the scope of our project to attainable tasks. We made up for what we lacked in experience by taking advantage of our resources. We attended most of the workshops that were offered to us and reached out to the mentors so that we could create the best project possible. We were unsure how to present visual elements of our project but after going to a workshop on Figma decided that it would be the perfect tool to envision our app.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are excited to be familiar with a brand new tool to envision and present an app design (Figma).

What we learned

We learned the concrete skill of creating prototypes in Figma. Additionally, the workshops provided an overview of many different aspects of programming that, together, gave us new insight into the complex process behind all software (and hardware) development. Overall, we learned about how the fields of psychology, business, and technology can work simultaneously to support each other and create a more sustainable future.

What's next for BeSus

We would love to create more social interactions between users. We would love to support existing sustainable companies and events by functioning as a piece in the communication network between them and local BeSus users. In our own computer science journeys we would love to learn more about connecting the back-end and front-end development to progress our app.