CarbonSaurus

advert
our widget!
Cute little dino!
Onboarding!
The diary page
Adding a new diary entry!
The feed
Viewing our stats

Inspiration

The growing climate crisis is affecting everyone globally but is not talked about enough! We wanted to provide a way for people to stay aware of the incoming crisis and understand of their carbon emissions on a day-to-day basis while also keeping them engaged. Thus we used virtual pets (dinosaurs)!

What it does

You, the user, own a virtual dinosaur! Your digital jurassic buddy helps you log your daily carbon emissions in a diary, browse the news and learn more about climate change through the use of quizzes and useful breakdowns. However, your dino really doesn't like it when you use a lot of carbon, and is very prone to mood swings! You must keep your dino happy through accumulating Dino Points, our in-app currency.

All the art in the app is hand-drawn and animated!

How we built it

We built the entire application using SwiftUI, using tools like the GitHub Desktop and the Xcode IDE for development.

Challenges we ran into

Throughout this period we ran into many challenges notably the API fetching in our feed screen. It took us nearly five hours to debug and solve and ended up being a null-type issue in the JSON. Another challenge we ran into was making our IOS home screen widget for the app on Xcode; this was especially hard since both of us did not have experience developing widgets so that is something a new technology we learned on the spot.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of our designs and overall conceptualization of the app since we spent nearly three hours at the start of the hackathon thinking of ideas and wireframes to apply. We are also proud of the number of screens and features built in only a span of 24 hours along with a widget.

What we learned

The ability to work as a team and leveraging tools at hand, such as GitHub, were crucial for us to be able to streamline development. We also learned many kinks in the Swift language that we were not aware of before which gave us a much deeper understanding of the app and the technology it was built upon.

What's next for CarbonSaurus

We hope to continue developing CarbonSaurus beyond this hackathon as we believe it is a fun and intuitive way for people to be aware of global warming; it is something that the world needs.