Eco Challenge

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Our team and idea

Our team is comprised of members who just got to meet each other at this event. We have two students from UW Madison, one from Purdue, and one in high school. However, we all shared in this being our very first Hackathon experience and an interest in coding in Java. Once our team was formed, we went through a brainstorming process, as none of us had a set idea of what to make. Some ideas we went through were mobile games, tracking foods people eat, and a carbon footprint calculator. We ended up deciding on a game that encourages users to participate in positive actions that benefit the environment. This game isn't just solely on your phone, instead the actions you take in real life help you win the game. Users compete against each other to reach a set goal amount of points. Users gain points by logging environmentally friendly actions they take such as carpooling, taking public transport, or recycling. Initially, we wanted the app to just be a game, but later we realized the potential of pitching this as an app for companies to hold competitions among their employees. We felt that using competitive spirit was a good way to get people to take more positive actions in reducing carbon footprint.

How we built it

We decided to use Android Studio, an IDE that we were all new to. The challenge was that we were all programming functions we were not familiar with and we learned that it takes a lot of time to learn how to program for an Android app. We had planned to have more features in our app but realized based on the amount of time we had to spend learning instead of programming was too high. We prioritized having a finished product and were not able to complete some functions like multiplayer and custom created competitions, however these would be the next priorities given more time. In the end, we were very happy with our product as we were able to program user authentication, real time data storage, a Leaderboard graphic that updates based on points gained, a daily point counter, and ability to log activities.