-
Groups
-
Challenges
-
Leaderboard
-
Overview
-
Homepage
-
AI-Generated Challenges Upon Request by User
Inspiration
Living sustainably often feels overwhelming. Traditional advice frequently emphasizes drastic lifestyle shifts or perfectionism, leaving people burnt out or disconnected from their efforts. We realized that long-term environmental impact doesn't start with perfection—it starts with small, daily, compound habits. We built GreenGoals to transform everyday eco-friendly actions (like choosing to walk, avoiding single-use plastics, or reducing energy waste) into an accessible, habit-forming experience driven by gamification and social accountability.
What it does
GreenGoals turns sustainable living into a social game that tracks individual consistency and collective progress:
Daily AI Challenges: Users receive fresh, tailored sustainability tasks every UTC day generated via Google GenAI / Gemini.
Streak & Habit Tracking: Tracks completed actions, ongoing streaks, and cumulative points to build consistent daily momentum.
Social Groups & Leaderboards: Users can create or join community groups (friends, classmates, neighborhoods) to compete on live group leaderboards and pool their impact.
Interactive Demo Mode: Offers an instant browser-only sandbox with sample data so new visitors can explore core flows without immediately signing in.
How we built it
Frontend: Built with React and Vite for rapid development and snappy UI rendering, styled with custom CSS for a friendly eco-aesthetic.
Authentication & Database: Firebase Authentication powers secure Google sign-ins, while Cloud Firestore handles real-time persistence for user profiles, challenge histories, and group memberships.
Serverless Backend: Firebase Cloud Functions orchestrate trusted server-side transactions, user profile creation, and group participation rules.
AI Integration: Google GenAI (Gemini) generates practical, context-aware daily sustainability tasks securely within backend functions.
Challenges we ran into
AI Task Consistency & Rate-Limiting: Ensuring Gemini returns structured, practical, and inclusive tasks within strict daily generation quotas (once per UTC day per user) required tight prompt crafting and server-side state enforcement.
Balancing Friction: Integrating authentication with a seamless preview required designing a dedicated client-side demo state that cleanly isolates local sandbox actions from production Firebase collections.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
- Architecting an end-to-end serverless system where score tampering is prevented through strict Firestore security rules and backend validation.
- Implementing automated, daily AI prompt pipelines that provide realistic sustainability actions without demanding unrealistic lifestyle changes.
- Designing an approachable, encouraging dashboard interface with cohesive typography, soft palette gradients, and intuitive stats visualization.
What we learned
- Gamification Trust: In habit trackers with leaderboards, trust is paramount; moving points and streak calculations entirely to the backend is crucial for fair community dynamics.
- Habit Formation Dynamics: Small, actionable, and repeatable goals drive significantly better retention than broad, high-effort sustainability targets.
- Serverless Edge Cases: Managing atomic operations across Firebase Functions highlighted the necessity of idempotent task verification and predictable state rollbacks.
What's next for GreenGoals
- Photo & Proof Verification: Integrating multimodal AI to verify challenge submissions through uploaded photos.
- Real-World Impact Metrics: Translating accrued points directly into estimated environmental metrics, such as liters of water saved or kilograms of CO₂ offset.
- Team Milestones & Shared Quests: Adding cooperative group goals where members collaborate to unlock collective environmental milestones.
- Native Mobile Experience: Packaging the core dashboard into a cross-platform mobile app with daily push reminders and streak alerts.
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.