EcoVerse

Inspiration

Walking around campus, we notice that many students do not recycle despite being right next to a trashcan and a recycling bin. The psychology behind that is that there is a belief that individual effort does not make a difference, perceived inconvenience, and confusion about what items are recyclable or not. This is why we were filled with a passion to create a gamified sustainable platform that encourages college students to participate in these green activities and improve sustainability.

What it does

EcoVerse is an interactive platform that encourages college students to recycle through engaging gamified activities and challenges. Integrating learning with encouragement urges students to build lasting sustainable habits. It has a list of the sustainable events and activities happening around campus such as Campus Clean Up which notifies students of what actions they can perform. There is a scanner feature that allows students to take a picture of the items they recycled and when they take a picture of and upload the qr code next to the bin they earn

How we built it

We built Ecoverse as a React application with TailwindCSS to create a clean and responsive interface. Navigation across pages like the dashboard, scanner, leaderboard, and chatbot is handled with React Router. To simulate real-world verification, we integrated a QR scanning component using react-qr-reader, allowing students to “scan” refill stations or event check-ins to earn points. All data is managed locally with React state and seeded demo profiles to showcase dorm and student leaderboards that update in real time.

Challenges we ran into

Coming up with a way to motivate college students to recycle was challenging since many other organizations strive for the same goal, however, oftentimes they are not successful. This poses a question of why college students will be motivated to recycle with our platforms. By doing intense research we discover the psychology of students and incentives of why a student would recycle. Additionally since our platform is a social platform that is gamified it will bring out the competitive aspects out of students in order to strive to be the best in recycling ultimately achieving sustainability.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud that we were able to create this platform to address a problem that is apparent in our daily lives and especially in the college community.

What we learned

By combating the issue of climate change, we learned that our platform is able to create a more sustainable environment by engaging students in these green initiatives. We learned that our Earth is drastically changing as a result of climate change and global warming, which are fueled by unsustainable practices such as excessive waste and insufficient recycling. The only way to lessen global warming and climate change is if we as a community start recycling and implementing other changes like carpooling to be more sustainable.

What's next for EcoVerse

We want to integrate a verification system to ensure that students are recycling the appropriate things. Additionally we aspire to expand this platform to more colleges across the United States. We plan to expand our platform to not just college students, but also reaching high school students and the younger generation because they will shape our future in making the Earth more sustainable.