Inspiration
COP26 concluded a few months ago, and highlighted the need for the world to do more to combat climate change. Although control over huge corporations is beyond the three of us devs, we felt that we could motivate people to make small but meaningful changes in their lives. For example, reducing methane was a focus from COP26, and reducing milk consumption is a simple way to do so.
What it does
Our web app gamifies actions to reduce an individual's environmental footprint. After registration, the user completes a questionnaire about their current habits. This is fed into a complex matrix of probabilities and known impact reductions to build a model of likely actions that this user would take. For example, a user may indicate that it would be highly difficult for them to give up flying, but it would be easy to reduce their milk consumption.
Next, the user is presented with a dashboard of actions that the app recommends that they take. Each time, an action is taken, the user is rewarded with points.
How we built it
We started by brainstorming ideas for the Oxford Hackathon 22 challenges. Eventually we settled on tackling an individual's environmental footprint in small but impactful steps. Next, we whiteboarded the screens and user interactions, segmented the app's architecture, and divided up the work. Every 3 hours, we took a team checkpoint to realistically evaluate our progress and make course corrections. Adopting MVC and sorting out the interface on Google docs allowed us to integrate, although integration was not without its own difficulties.
Challenges we ran into
Development and integration within 24 hours was perilous. We also encountered various technical difficulties like access to Github going down. We were also new to technologies like Auth0 which did not work in our app on the first try.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are incredibly proud of the following:
- Oscar and Viktor are freshers and are brand new to hackathons, and Jonathan has not participated in any for 5+ years, so we were all coming to this completely fresh
- Being total strangers before the hackathon started but overcoming our differences
- Building a working app on the domain https://greenme.tech
- Teamwork through the difficulties encountered
What we learned
We learnt that:
- Building an app as a team is hard
- For a hackathon, a narrow and manageable scope is overwhelmingly important
- Auth0 is very convenient
- Viktor is a great singer and we recommend him for Eurovision
What's next for Green Me
We hope that many people will use our app to build green habits and save our planet one task at a time.
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