Champion Garden Sim

post-user-input
pre-user-input

Inspiration

Growing up, my family always had a home garden that we maintained in the summer. This has taught me the importance of understanding where your food comes from as well as how much better home grown food tastes! There's a relatively high barrier to entry for home gardening if you've never done it before, as a lot of the knowledge is passed down intergenerationally. This is more true now than ever as agriculture and basic cooking skills seem to take a backseat in our modern education system. The more tools to make it easier to grow fresh produce, the better!

What it does

The main goal of this program is to help the user visualize the layout of their (future) garden. The user inputs the amount of space they have to work with, as well as their needs for walkway spacing, and the program will diagram the maximum number of 3ft rows possible with whatever crops the user wants to plant.

How we built it

Everything is written from scratch in the C#/.net framework.

Challenges we ran into

This is my first hackathon ever, so my biggest challenge came from having too grand of an idea. Even what I initially thought would be a simple idea ended up being way too much for a 36hr challenge. I ended up starting completely over from scratch at 5pm on Saturday night!

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The UI looks fairly clean despite the time crunch I had at the end. I would have liked to have enough time to design my own graphics.

What we learned

It's best to start out with a smaller, simpler project idea that you know you can complete, rather than being overly-ambitious when participating in Hackathons. Also, there was another team I hung out with for the first half of the hackathon, but we weren't working on the same project. That sense of community was nice to have, so for next year's TigerHacks, I'm hoping to be a part of a full roster.

What's next for Champion Garden Sim

Some potential areas for expansion: allow the user to set goals for their garden setup in new/different ways; set up a database to hold crop stats possibly bringing ROI into the equation?