EcoBits

home-page
garden-collection

Inspiration

We wanted to make sustainability feel less like a chore and more like a game. Eco-friendly habits are sometimes framed around making a sacrifice or guilt, which can discourage people from doing them. Our inspiration came from the idea of turning small actions into a fun and rewarding experience, like growing a digital garden that reflects your real-world impact.

What it does

EcoBits is a playful, eco‑friendly habit tracker that transforms sustainability into a rewarding game. With a simple dropdown, users log eco‑friendly actions from different categories, such as sustainable transportation or waste reduction, and earn points for each choice. Throughout the week, their points add up in a counter. When they hit a threshold, they unlock a special reward: a unique digital seed or plant that grows their personal “greenhouse” collection.

How we built it

We build EcoBits using React for the front-end, styled with CSS for a clean and responsive design. The app tracks user information through Supabase, so users can continually contribute to their garden. Supabase also gives us the flexibility to expand into features like leaderboards and community challenges in the future.

Challenges we ran into

Without a dedicated UI/UX designer, we found it challenging to make cohesive design decisions and ensure that our interface reflected the "vibe" and values we envisioned for the app.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We successfully implemented our full MVP with smooth functionality and no major technical issues. We were happy to see all the core features come together exactly as planned!

What we learned

Two-thirds of our team became significantly more comfortable and confident using React!

What's next for EcoBits

In the future, we hope to improve the garden page by allowing users to be able to choose what to plant in their virtual garden. It would be really cool if we could partner with environmental organizations so that for every virtual plant, a real tree (or similar) is grown.