CARbon Calculator

home screen of the app
leaderboard screen of the app
submission and stats screen of the app

Inspiration

We realized that the way our lives are structured, we have very little control of our carbon emissions and it is difficult to track: simply buying food at the grocery store has an environmental impact due to the farming process, transport, etc. However, limiting the miles we drive and choosing not to order food delivery services is one way we can limit our carbon footprint.

What it does

Our app/website is a new form of social media, where you log your miles driven and miles driven by food delivery service drivers. The project will convert these miles to pounds of carbon emitted and rank which of your iPhone contacts has the smallest carbon footprint each week.

How we built it

We prototyped the app using Figma, a resource recommended to us by a workshop in the hackathon. We then created a website that had some more functionality, since we were unable to code the app itself.

Challenges we ran into

We knew we wanted to create an app, but realized too late that we were a little out of our league with appdev as a team of all first time, non-CS major hackers. We then decided to instead just prototype the app, and use our (albeit limited) knowledge of web design to get some functionality (the username and password login, etc) that we would have wanted to put in our app.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were able to keep calm and persist through a lot of difficulty in getting started: being unsure of just how much we would be able to do, starting an appdev project we were not able to finish, etc. We are proud of our dedication to finish this hackathon and submit something by the end.

What we learned

We learned a lot about the world of CS: what front-end development is and how its different than back-end development, what the blockchain is, and about API and servers. More importantly, we gained some necessary experience in overcoming challenges as a team and adapting and overcoming setbacks together.

What's next for CARbon Calculator

As we learn more about appdev, we do plan on actually finishing the app and adding the functionality from the website (and more!) to finalize the project.