EcoCredit

Inspiration

The theme this year was environment. After much deliberation, we decided to make a Discord bot since many of us use it to chat with our friends.

What it does

EcoCredit counts user messages, and after a certain threshold of messages is met, it shows an ad via a Discord message. The funds that we make from the ads can be used to hire a non-profit organization that will plant trees. Users will get credit for watching ads and after an amount of credit is reached, they can "buy a tree" and so the funds from the ads will be used to pay the non-profit for planting a tree.

How we built it

We used Python on Replit using the Discord Bot API.

Challenges we ran into

We are all beginners so our knowledge was highly limited. We also went to all the workshops to learn about the different pathways in computer science so that limited our time to 1-2 hours to work. It took us time to think of an idea and we faced coding errors while trying to work.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were able to create a functional bot that will be able to fight climate change by allowing users to (indirectly) plant trees by watching ads. As beginner coders, we are proud of making code that will be able to slowly combat climate change and help reforest the ecosystem and the world.

What we learned

We learned how to use the Discord Bot API and how to debug in Python. We figured out how to research and get help. On a side note, from the workshops, we learned much more about coding, Machine learning, the history and future of cryptology, and much more that will help us in the future when thinking about career pathways and our interests as well as increasing our passion in the field.

What's next for EcoCredit

We will try to make our bot more functional and run smoother as well as find a non-profit organization willing to plant trees and have real ads to get funds to plant the trees. We would also like to make it accessible to the public and spread the bot to other messaging websites in order to get more money to plant trees and be able to combat climate change on a greater level.