PlanetPulse

Inspiration

Climate change is a complex issue that affects our planet and its inhabitants in numerous ways, from rising temperatures and sea levels to deforestation and extreme weather events. However, understanding the intricacies of climate change can be overwhelming for many people, and accessibility to such information is often limited. We believe that everyone should have access to accurate and easily understandable information about climate change. The inspiration comes from the desire to raise awareness, educate, and empower individuals to take action toward mitigating climate change. Imagine a world where understanding climate change is simple and accessible to everyone. Where real-time data and interactive maps come together to visualize the impacts of climate change in a way that empowers action. Introducing Planet Pulse, the web app that makes climate change information easy to understand and accessible to all.

What it does

Planet Pulse is a web app that simplifies the complexities of climate change and improves accessibility by providing a user-friendly dashboard that displays top climate-related stories from around the world. Users can explore events related to climate change on an interactive map, categorized by event type. The web app also includes a query function that allows users to search for events by location. Additionally, Planet Pulse provides a list of the most recent news related to climate change. To ensure understanding, the web app offers description and explanation features, catering to school, college, and advanced levels. Planet Pulse also encourages user contributions by allowing news to be added by contributors, fostering a collaborative environment. With its diverse features, Planet Pulse aims to raise awareness, educate, and empower individuals to take action on climate change.

How we built it

We used Convex to build and deploy our web app using React and node.js. On the backend we use GPT-4 APIs to summarize articles and provide different levels of explanation. TBD

Challenges we ran into

While building the prototype of Planet Pulse, our team encountered several challenges. Firstly, finding reliable data sources for geo-tagged climate stories proved to be a daunting task, as the availability and quality of data varied greatly. Additionally, cleaning the data to ensure accuracy and consistency required significant effort and time.

Another challenge was familiarizing ourselves with various full-stack development tools such as Appwrite, Convex, Vello, etc. These tools had different functionalities and learning curves, requiring additional time and effort for the team to understand if they would fit our usecase. Furthermore, while trying out various platforms to build the website, we faced difficulties in connecting the backend with the front end. This required troubleshooting and debugging to resolve compatibility issues and establish smooth communication between the different components of the web app. We finally chose convex because of its extensive documentation, ease of use and flexibility.

Additionally, as a team with limited experience in React, we had to overcome the learning curve associated with this popular JavaScript library for building user interfaces. This required dedicating extra time for self-learning and experimenting with different React components to achieve the desired functionality for the web app. Lastly, connecting the front end with the back end posed challenges in terms of ensuring seamless integration and smooth data flow between the two components. Despite these challenges, our team remained determined and proactive in finding solutions and overcoming obstacles to create a functional and user-friendly prototype for Planet Pulse.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Mission and Business Plan: Assessed an unmet need in both the climate-tech and education spaces Planned a minimum-viable-product and carved out a potential business model

Our Product: Minimum-Viable-Product Built a usable first prototype using Convex and React - with no prior experience with either technology Collected a rich set of climate news articles Used GPT to generate high-quality summaries, location data, and key-concept explanations for each article

What we learned

We learned a lot about new technologies and frameworks in a short amount of time!

What's next for PlanetPulse

Scale up dataset and update data set daily Expand coverage of non-English articles Add explanations of difficult concepts at 4th, 8th, and 12th grade levels Develop more sophisticated ML models to rank articles Targeted news-feeds Add gamification to encourage users to report local problems