Inspiration

For us, the initial inspiration came from the question of how we could increase awareness of environmental concerns. Initially, the idea was to record data on pollution to cause social change, so that's when we changed tactics and began to look into exposure via social media. The base concept was to build an internet personality that viewers could personally connect with (in this case, it's a bear). Then, by showing the detrimental effects of pollution/other environmentally harmful events we could get others to empathize and connect.

What it does

Essentially our main product is a virtual bear whose environment and overall health change based on location and current events respectively. For example, if your area had a low air index, the bear would show a foggy background to indicate so. For the health example, the bear would initially start at a base amount of total life points; afterward, its health, physical appearance, and animation would either improve or stagnate based on the type of news. All headline articles would be relevant to environmental concerns and their effects on the bear would be based on the news' severity. In addition, the bottom bar would show the headline for today's event, and the sidebar would show miscellaneous data like pollution and air quality.

How we built it

The main product's UI and display, as well as art, were displayed via react javascript. The air pollution data was curated from real-time weather APIs, and the specific headline & categorical severity were to be curated by an admin.

Challenges we ran into

The main challenge we had mainly came from just brainstorming and coming up with the initial idea, especially since our team was comprised mostly of freshmen. For a long time, we wanted to come up with a way to generate better pollution statistics, but for a lot of those ideas, we came up against a technical barrier. Therefore, I feel coming up with something which both seemed to address the problem and remedy our shortcomings was a satisfactory compromise.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We’re proud of working with IDEs we’ve never worked with before. We’re also proud to overcome our technical limitations in this hackathon.

What we learned

We learned a lot about web dev so HTML, CSS, and especially javascript. In addition, when researching environmental concerns we gained a lot of knowledge on current technologies and limitations for environmental efforts.

What's next for EcoBear

The next step would be to proliferate EcoBear ever further. With a stronger social presence, ecobear could have its own brand, spread further, and be able to continue to spread a positive environmentalist message to the mainstream.