Eco Log

Home screen
Impact summary
Leader board

Inspiration

Every day, human activities continue to have a negative impact on the world around us. Although most of this negative impact is not caused by the everyday citizen, there are actions each of us can take in our daily lives to better our planet and drive society towards environmental consciousness.

Through our combined effort, we can save our planet! There’s no better time than today to start building environmentally-friendly habits. We were inspired by apps that emphasize personal progress and community-building, like Strava and Duolingo, to track

What it does

Eco Log is a social media app that lets you track and post about your daily efforts to become more environmentally conscious. We specifically decided to let users log recycling, composting, eating less meat, taking alternative forms of transportation, and picking up trash because we thought that these behaviors were both very doable and very impactful.

Eco Log incentivizes continued engagement by letting users see the impact their actions are having on the real world. Through the dashboard, which shows your progress over time (based on how many actions you log and how many points those actions are worth), users have a clear and comprehensive log of their actions over time.

Our app emphasizes also the community based nature of change by enabling users who live near each other see the efforts their neighbors are taking to become more environmentally conscious. Users can participate in community-organized events publicized on our platform, and can also choose to post certain actions they’re proud of for others in their city to see, like going a week without meat! For those who aren’t as enthusiastic about sharing, posts can be marked ‘private’ so that progress can be kept personal. Further adding to the community aspect, users have the ability to see leaderboards featuring the users with the highest points both locally and nationally.

Our hope is that by using this app, people find it easier and more fun to make environmentally conscious decisions!

How we built it

React.js on the Frontend Firestore for our database Node.js with express for Backend

Challenges we ran into

One of our collaborators dropped out 18 hours in due to an unavoidable conflict. Because he had the most experience with databases/backend and our other member with backend experience was based in India, our US-based members spent a while figuring out how to integrate the frontend with our partially-built backend.

We were a bit too ambitious with our original goals. We scrambled a bit towards the end to put together our submission.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We made it to the end, have a final product working, and learned a lot along the way!!

What we learned

Divide and CONQUER!!
- Planning and communication are the keys of a good project! Making sure that everyone was on the same page at the very beginning helped us communicate about what we wanted later on (even when we were very sleep deprived).
- How to write server requests
- How to write/read information to/from a database
- react-bootstrap SAVES LIVES

What's next for Eco Log

We’re hoping to reinforce the community aspect of the app. We want users to be able to follow their friends and people they’re interested in to better reinforce the community aspect of the app. Additionally, users will eventually be able to create “clubs” with coworkers, classmates, or just friends to compete more directly for points and for further incentivization with club leaderboards.

We also want to let users use their points for entries in rewards/raffles at events and have schedule page to let users see their upcoming events.