EcoGarden

Inspiration

Our team realized that our society puts a lot of pressure on adults on being eco-friendly, but doesn't do much to change the views of our younger generations. If we truly want to have a green future and revitalize our forests, we have to educate our youth. They are the future. Most children these days are constantly looking at their screens and watching youtube videos that don't have a purpose. So why not replace their screentime with something useful that can impact our society positively? We believe a bright future is still possible as long as everyone does their part.

What it does

We developed a trivia game that brings to light certain behaviors and tasks that we can do to make a positive impact on our environment. The player will see a question, he will be able to choose from the two options by swiping right or left. After answering, he will see an explanation as to why he was right or wrong. The player will have 3 lives, if he loses all 3 of them, he will be reset to the beginning. Once the player gets through all the answers, there will be a congratulation screen explaining that all the questions answered can save the planet.

How we built it

The app was made entirely in swift, which is the native apple language. We chose to use a native language since they tend to have fewer bugs and compatibility issues. The User interface was created using Apple's Animation Delegates and Gesture recognizers. The cards themselves were created as their own class, which allows for easy changes and developers to add more cards. The project structure was MVC(Model View Controller) in order to follow Apple's recommendations and allow for easy debugging and understanding. The app's interface was inspired by Tinder's swiping mechanism and the game Reigns which utilizes a similar concept. We followed an online tutorial for help to create this interface and adapted it to our app's needs.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge we ran into was actually finding the idea. There were so many possibilities that it was hard to choose a specific topic. There was a lot of fighting between the team members to decide what we were going to do. Once we figured that out, we didn't have many blockades for a while. We also argued what platform we should be using for our product. We wanted something accessible and simple to use. Each of us is proficient in different platforms, so choosing one for all of us to work on created some tension. We decided to go with swift since it is a known language for app development for iOS and it would create the best product for our target audience. We also ran into a few coding problems, as usual, but thanks to our solid programming background, they were not much of an obstacle. We struggled to create a meaningful yet simple design that would both portray a symbol of degradation to the planet yet be clear enough for kids to understand what was going on. We decided to stick with colored planets slowly becoming redder and redder with each mistake made. This design is both elegant and simple to understand, any child will understand that the bad decision is detrimental to the environment.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are particularly proud of making a product that can potentially change our future. Every single one of us wants to leave an impact in this world and we believe this app is a good start. We are very happy that our app is functional and that our goal of the app being available to the public is getting closer. This is our very first hackathon and we did not believe that we would even be able to compete against the other teams that have many second and third years while we are all first years, but we still persisted

What we learned

This hackathon was a great learning experience for many of us. First, Maximilian is a Finance student and was not the most proficient in coding but with the help of his teammates was able to learn a lot about the software and coding world. Our team also learned how to work better together. The start of this project was hard and had a lot of arguing, but now our team is very well harmonized and has grown a lot. We learned how to fix many errors while learning how to code an app, let alone an interactive game. This hackathon was an amazing learning experience and it is guaranteed that we will do it again.

What's next for EcoGarden

EcoGarden is extremely flexible, in terms of the content. We specifically modified our code so that our app can be modified very quickly. The social issue we chose first for this particular project was to educate the younger generation about their environmental impact, but we realized that it can push awareness for any important topic currently or that has happened. The information in the app can also be changed to target a different demographic and age group. In the future, we hope to publish the app after a few improvements, such as animations, sound, etc... Once it is published we also like to change the content and social issues, on a bi-weekly basis, to educate others on different aspects.

Built With

• mvc
• swift