Deployment
Netlify: carbonquiz.netlify.app
Domain.com Hosting to GCP and Netlify (Awaiting DNS Configuration): carbontips.tech, carbonquiz.tech
Domain.com Registered: carbonconscience.tech, carbonconscious.tech
Inspiration
Our inspiration for the Carbon Quiz stems from the immense sustainability that America faces. Despite American making up a small portion of the entire world’s population, more than a quarter of the world's greenhouse gas emissions originate from the United States. Sustainability is already a large recognized national issue, however, Americans do not fully internalize their own contributions to these missions. There needs to be a more effective method of finding out your own individual footprint while encouraging a more sustainable lifestyle.
What it does
In response, Carbon quiz generates a simulation-like quiz in which users are present with randomly generated scenarios. Assuming users choose the option that they are most likely to choose in reality when facing a similar scenario, the quiz will calculate a relative value for their carbon footprint and compare them to how they stack with other quiz takers. In addition, users are also scored in specific categories such as home and food, and , depending on unsustainable choices that users chose, the quiz will output tips to help improve their sustainability.
How we built it
Carbon Quiz was built with Google Firebase, Node.js, GitHub, React, and Sass. The application was deployed with Netlify and uses Domain.com for hosting.
Challenges we ran into
A few of the challenges we faced were maintaining React component states, understanding how we could conditionally render parts of our app so we could only use one page. In addition, implementing Firebase using React was challenging due to our lack of experience in using asynchronous methods between the database and React rendering.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We were Able to build Carbon Quiz in React, allowing us to reuse the components of the app and make the app more flexible for future development, make an animated score metric using Sass which makes the app looks more professional and interesting, and although challenging, we were able to connect to Firebase database which allows us to store data of all users and retrieve them to analyze the results.
What we learned
We learned how to design an efficient data flow between the application and database. We also learned how to deploy our app to a host and work with DNS for a custom domain through Domain.com.
What's next for Carbon Quiz
Carbon Quiz has a lot of potential for development in the future. One immediate improvement that may be added is a larger variety of questions in order to better score a user’s carbon footprint. A future goal would be to try to rate other metrics such as health and money in order to present the difficulties of balancing sustainability and well-being.
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