DoGood

Inspiration:

We live in an epidemic of burnout and disconnection and the online world effectively fills this gap with instant gratification through the dopamine of scrolling and easy rewards; our vision was to leverage these patterns to Do Good. Through trackable acts of kindness, productivity, and self-growth, DoGood guides users in building purpose while creating a tangible, real-world interest.

What it does:

DoGood will present opportunities for social good and self-improvement through four pages that have tasks that require photo verification: Serve: The first tab, Serve, connects you with ways to give back. You can find local volunteer opportunities, community service projects, or even respond to crisis-assistance alerts. There’s also an environmental mini-game that turns recycling and trash pickup into friendly local competitions where you log what you clean, earn XP, and see your positive impact grow. Be Productive: The Be Productive tab helps you make good use of your time. You can set focus timers for tasks, and the app sends gentle notifications to keep you accountable. It also uses smart tracking to remind you of activities you haven’t done in a while, like that personal project you left half-finished, or that hobby you love but forgot. Completing tasks or having a productive work session with the timer can also earn XP. Self-improve: The Self-Improve tab remembers your progress and gives personalized suggestions to earn XP, maybe journaling today, maybe reconnecting with an old friend. Over time, it becomes your personal coach for growth, mindfulness, and relationships. Shop: Finally, all this effort pays off, literally for good causes. Every task completed earns XP. You can spend your XP in the Shop to fund real charitable donations, from supporting food banks to environmental nonprofits. You’re improving yourself and your community at the same time. If a user opens the app and isn’t sure what part of doing good they want to prioritize for the day, they can speak with the “DoGood companion,” that can work with the user to narrow down goals and provide direction to a page that aligns with what the user can accomplish.

How we built it:

Once narrowing down the scope of what we wanted to accomplish for this version of DoGood, we began working on the frontend and UI/UX by describing the functionality and the vision for the four main buttons and debugging any faulty design through the site. We integrated this code to our GitHub repository with more frontend development made with Cursor and React. We finally integrated sponsors like Claude for the functionality and verification of all the features and LiveKit for the DoGood companion.

Challenges we ran into:

The biggest challenges we ran into was narrowing down the scope for this version of the app because the inspiration to DoGood could mean a lot of things pertaining to social good and self-improvement with endless possibilities. Another challenge we ran into was debugging tools including LiveKit and Interaction Co to be integrated into the app.

Accomplishments that we’re proud of

Accomplishments that we are proud of are streamlining a clean UI/UX for different iterations of the app, leveraging Claude for verification, prompt engineering a LiveKit chatbox, and creating context API for knowledge transfer between different agents.

What’s next?

The next steps for DoGood are giving it an aspect of community–having challenges within schools like USC or between different schools or group affiliations to encourage competition for the dopamine of earning XP. With a community page, users can organize their own service opportunities for everybody to partake in and encourage more proactivity when doing good. To accomplish this, we hope to partner with local nonprofit organizations from RCC, UC Berkeley, and USC to provide service and donation opportunities within the app.