Carbon Points

Gamifying greener methods of transportation through the use of online leader-boards, competition between friends, and other incentives to take a bike or public transportation over a car.

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Inspiration

Carbon Points was born out of a desire to make people more likely to take the greener option. When presented with a choice with no immediate benefits, many people will take the choice that's more convenient, even if they're aware that the other choice would be better for the environment. By turning it into a game, that problem is solved. The game aspect of it provides an immediate benefit that will cause people to choose greener methods of transportation more often. The idea of gamifying greener transportation is what inspired Carbon Points.

What it does

Carbon Points allows the user to earn points for taking greener transportation methods, such as bicycling or public transportation, over cars. These points are then put on a leaderboard, where the quest to go green is turned into a competitive game among friends.

How we built it

We first started by splitting into two section: API and App. We then started to define the different API endpoints, as that would need to be synced between the API and App development. After, two of us worked on the API while one of us started on developing the mobile app.

Challenges we ran into

  • Choosing the correct database for performance and ease of use proved to be a challenge. although things got easier
  • Connecting HTTP requests into flutter for interacting with the API proved to be much more difficult than thought
    • Managing stateful and stateless widgets in flutter caused some issues

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • In under 30 hours, we've developed a mobile application almost ready for production and a usable backend API for it
  • The app is designed well

What we learned

Everyone on the team interacted with a new technology at some point during development. One of us had not used flutter prior to this week, one of us was unsure what an API even was, and one of us had very little experience with backend programming.

What's next for Carbon Points

We intend to continue to develop this idea into a usable app.

What still needs to be completed

  • While the UI design for the app looks nice, it lacks any sort of animation for transitioning between items
  • The app currently only displays data that was already collected and manually added, we ran out of time to make the app and API talk
  • The API needs some security improvements. We initially attempted to salt and hash the passwords, but due to buggy behavior, we're just storing the passwords in plain text in the database, which is a very bad idea for a production site.
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