HawaiiHackers

A fun game with challenges to motivate people to build a cleaner Hawai'i and share their efforts with the community.

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Inspiration

The Department of Land and Resources inspired and initiated the creation of this game to motivate more people to take part in building a better Hawai'i. Their idea was released through the Hawaii Annual Code Challenge for 2021 and our team came together to put their idea into real life.

What it does

Pono Points is an application where visitors and residents of Hawai'i are able to participate in challenges and share submissions about improving the land and/or natural resources of Hawai'i.

Visitors and Residents are able to:

  • Share submissions for points
  • Accept and do challenges for points
  • Use their points for rewards at local companies

Companies are able to:

  • Approve of submissions for points (Specifically DLNR)
  • Create and release challenges for points
  • Approve of completed challenges for points
  • Create rewards that are redeemable for points
  • Approve of rewards and points transaction

How we built it

We built it using Meteor, MongoDB, React, Semantic UI, and JavaScript using IntelliJ as our chosen editor. We utilized collections to manage our data such as the challenges, profiles, and submissions.

Security and Privacy

One way to address Security and Privacy concerns is to enable SSL encryption. This is a security protocol that encrypts connections between clients and servers. With SSL, sensitive data being transmitted is secured. Our app was deployed to the .meteorapp.com subdomain where encryption is automatically enabled. Users also have the option to opt in or opt out of sharing their submissions with other users. This can be updated at any time.

Another implementation would be to enable Github Dependabot. Dependabot is a feature that alerts you of vulnerable dependencies and performs automatic security updates for your app.

Challenges we ran into

Some challenges we ran into were the time constraints of the competition because both team members are active college students with jobs, so we found it difficult to find time during the set weeks to work on it. Also, during the COVID-19 pandemic it was difficult to collaborate with the team members. Being overly ambitious was another obstacle we ran into because we wanted to achieve more than we could handle in the time frame. We have a wide variety of features, but we would like to develop them even further.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of being able to have put together a working application within a short period of time from a given challenge. We are also proud of implementing most of the features we wanted to create into the application and have majority of them being completely functional.

What we learned

We learned that time management and communication are the keys to success when working in a team. Learning to set our priorities straight and put aside the tasks that were less important. We realized that having a solid foundation in our application was extremely important. We learned to focus on the basics and make sure what we have at the moment is solid before we build on that with more features.

What's next for HawaiiHackers

We plan to fix bugs in the Pono Points application and add the rest of the features that we planned out like accepting and declining challenges posted by companies. We'll also be working on implementing educational games as another way to earn points. We also hope to explore other projects that would be beneficial for making Hawai'i a better place.

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