EcoQuest

Desktop Explore
Desktop Rewards Bottom
Desktop Rewards
Desktop Profile
Desktop Leaderboard

Inspiration

The description of the Frutiger Aero track played a large part in the service we created. We wanted to incorporate the "green" feeling that the Windows Vista aesthetic gave with a green/environmental related service.

What it does

EcoQuest encourages its users to travel green by walking, biking, or taking public transit rather than driving around. Traveling green earns points that you can use to increase your spot on the global leaderboard and to change the theme of your app!

How we built it

We started by dividing into working on a Springboot back end and a React frontend. The backend team handled the logic of user authentication, managing route logic, point tracking, Supabase integration, and creating APIs for the front end. The frontend team developed the interactive map from the Mapbox API and designed the layout for planning/executing routes and viewing pages such as rewards, the leaderboard, etc. After some time we merged our branches and fleshed out the integration of the front end to use the APIs the backend team created to sync with the database.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge we faced in development was the practice of having two teams. Most of us have had little to no experience in working in a team that is separated into a frontend and backend. Communicating things such as API calls and differences in implementation was very new, so that was a learning hurdle to get over.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are very happy with the fact that our website is deployed for anyone to use and experience. We are also very satisfied with the design/aesthetic of the program and how well we believe it matches the theme/track of the project. Also, we are proud of how individualized the front and back ends are so that it is technically rather scalable.

What we learned

A lot of what we learned came from the two-team development process. Some of us haven't had much experience with intense full-stack development, so watching and helping a service come to life helped us build a better understanding of development in the real world.

What's next for EcoQuest

After the hackathon, we are inspired to tune features that aren't quite as polished as we'd like. We also may consider adding periodic resets to the leaderboard score to encourage even competition, as well as a friends list to compare against the people you know. EcoQuest should theoretically stay deployed and live for a good chunk of time.