Eco Tracker

Inspiration

Many people want to be more eco-friendly but often don't know where to start. Our goal was to provide a fun, game-like tracker to provide incentives and motivation for anyone to adjust to a more sustainable lifestyle.

What it does

It has three main functions. The first function is to log all sustainable practices, recorded within a pre-established tier list (easy, medium, and hard) representing the positive impact on the environment. Negative and confusing inputs are not validated and don't add points to progress. Second, we added the "ECOBOT", an AI chatbot that can answer any questions regarding sustainability, including advice, clarification, or ideas of next steps for the user. Finally, we provided a "Weekly Summary" feature to generate a review of the user's weekly sustainability habits, highlighting accomplishments and places to improve.

How we built it

Because we are beginners, we relied on a mixture of AI—from engines such as ChatGPT and Gemini—GitHub, and some of our previous knowledge to build the program. Although a portion of our coding had assistance, we still went through the logic ourselves to understand the system and came up with most, if not all, ideas on our own to bring this project to life. Most of our work is noticed through the creativity and personal touches within the program.

Challenges we ran into

Initially we tried to separate the work into three parts to combine later on, but we realized the majority of our code was connected and had to adjust to work together as one. We moved more slowly, but we were able to fix a lot of our initial errors. After, most of our adjustments were small inconveniences we worked through to make our program more visually pleasing.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are very proud we moved past our initial mindset of working separately and connected to work as one unit. We also originally had a text-based program that we later decided to switch to an interface, which is more interactive and visually pleasing. Other accomplishments were along the lines of fixing our visuals (i.e., the growing plant and progress bar looping for each "level"), as we wanted to make this more than a basic program but a fun "game" for users.

What we learned

With programming, although we may have different working styles, it is important to listen to everyone's opinion. It's never too late to adjust to something new and adapt, even when we have spent a long time on our current model. When using AI, it's important to be specific when making requests, as AI can take things from many contexts and misinterpret what we wanted.

What's next for Eco Tracker

This program can easily be adjusted to a larger scale, allowing users to do more than just track their progress but also learn more about the environment and how to protect it. In the future, we want to adapt the program to reward users with prizes, including vouchers or planting trees, promoting further sustainability.