BioBuddies

Everyone wants to help keep our planet clean and healthy- but we can’t all be expected to remain perpetually vigilant. BioBuddy makes sustainable living a part of your day-to-day lifestyle and habits!

Comment

Inspiration

With our project, our goal was to put a focus on addressing one of the most severe problems that our local community faces- living sustainably. We help make the connected world much more enjoyable to experience due to the emphasis of our project on encouraging eco-friendly living.

What it does

We think that by gamifying a sustainable lifestyle, we will be benefiting the largest number of people through our environmentally conscious tracker / dashboard.

How we built it

  • We settled on an idea a bit later than we would have liked to- but we were able to make up for that lost time and then some by leveraging the power of Velo. The true testament of its capabilities lies in the fact that two of our team members had never touched web-development before and were able to pick up on how to use the interface right off the bat with little difficulties.
  • We created a database and made full-use of Velo’s pre-configured components to make things look look and function great! ## Challenges we ran into When a user creates an account, they are presented with a list of objectives that will reduce their waste, power consumption, and overall carbon footprint. Each objective completed grants the user points that contribute to a running total, as well as a daily meter that fills up when tasks are completed each day. What makes these objectives more compelling is our webapp’s leaderboard integration, allowing users to compete with each other to see who can amass the most points. This social aspect of our webapp drives engagement and encourages users to return to the site each day and check off tasks, reducing their impact on the environment. ## Accomplishments that we're proud of It feels truly amazing to have a working, compiling alpha version after just over 2 days of hacking together in a house with just 4 CS students plugging away at our laptops, which has culminated in not only hundreds of thousands of lines of code, but a very real application, with the actual functionality that was desired from the get-go. Despite our group’s overall lack of knowledge and experience with web-development, we managed to complete a proof-of-concept project with all team members gaining substantial web-development experience.

What we learned

Aside from the bevy of technical experience that our team gained from stepping outside of our individual comfort zones (e.g. working full-stack despite having very little experience with frontend or backend development respectively, but filling in those gaps in knowledge with the help of team members that had the answers to address specific issues that would ordinarily cause roadblocks in progress if we had been working individually) In this way, we learned that it takes a team working in synchrony to produce really good results without having to self-learn every single technical aspect required to implement features.

What's next for BioBuddies

Something our team wishes we had the time to implement during our brief project period was social media integration. A big goal for us is to allow users to automatically post point totals to their social media profiles on sites like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Another feature we wish we had time to implement was a “Badge” system, where users can reach certain point milestones that will grant them eye-catching badges, which would be presented on their profile and could also be posted to social media.

Built With

Share this project:

Updates