-
Main Page
-
Challenges
-
Identified Species
-
Logo
💡 Inspiration 💡
Nature photography is one of the most effective ways that the beauty of nature is shown to the public - and we were inspired by how nature photography contests both encourage the photographers to capture the diversity of the world, and provide people with a glimpse of it. A big problem, however, is the cost of entry: while photos can look deceivingly simple, it can be discouraging to the average person who can't afford expensive cameras, or spend weeks taking the perfect photo. With a little bit of help from technology, we can gamify hiking and exploring and help create our own competitions! By encouraging our users to go out, explore, and capture the flora of their surroundings with their own natural beauty contests, we can help them learn more about their local wildlife, developing a greater appreciation for nature!
❓ What it does ❓
Environmental Go strives to serve the ecosystem and environment by encouraging its users to go outside and explore a variety of species. Through weekly challenges, it encourages its users to take and upload pictures of plant species from the challenges, which are then checked for accuracy and counted towards the user's scores. At the end of each week, the top users on the leaderboard receive incentives as a form of reward.
🏗️ How we built it 🏗️
The project was built mainly using HTML/JS/CSS. The backend of the web application was made using Flask, Jinja and SQL. The frontend was made using Tailwind.css. User authentication was implemented by cross referencing from our data base, then storing user data such as images, scores, leaderboard standings and image data. The application was displayed as webpages with Jinja templating language and lastly the species classification was done through API calls handled with Flask.
🚧 Challenges we ran into 🚧
The biggest challenge that we ran into during development was communication: even though every member of our team had bright and innovative ideas, it was not always easy to implement it exactly according as envisioned - so we spent a lot of time on the drawing board to get exactly what we wanted out of the project. We faced more obstacles even after fully conceptualizing our product, however - a main part of the project is image recognition, and it was difficult to find technology that suited our exact needs. Specifically, our project asked for an API that could take pictures of plants and identify its scientific names, and finding an appropriate API took longer than expected, eating into valuable developing time.
✅ Accomplishments that we're proud of ✅
The entirety of this project was a great success, but more specifically parsing the JSON data from the API, and handling the data in our database proved to be extremity difficult and took countless hours and a collaborative mindset to fix. Nevertheless as a team we were able to overcome this hurdle.
🙋♂️ What we learned 🙋♂️
Out of the several takeaways from this experience we learned the importance of collaboration and teamwork. Without these 2 qualities none of this would have been possible. We excelled at splitting up smaller tasks to accomplish one goal, by splitting up members based on their skill set. This strategy proved to be very effective, and was a great learning experience. Furthermore we learned more about the ins and outs of SQL, as the majority of our project revolves around the usage of this technology.
💭 What's next? 💭
One of the main steps looking forward is to expand our project to fauna as well as flora - with all of the local wildlife possible, we can encourage an even more diverse pool of pictures and submissions, as well as give our users an opportunity to learn more about the biodiversity of the planet. Another problem that comes with an expanding user base is the possibility of cheating: so a following anti-cheat system is needed to prevent unoriginal or repeats of photos being submitted, ensuring that all of our users are rewarded earnestly. Finally, if our project starts to gain traction, we can use sponsors to add more variety into the weekly contests: for example, more initiatives can be started using the larger admission pools - combined with the possibility of sponsors - such as extra prizes for the users in the leaderboard, like camera equipment or hiking gear!
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.