Kampung Keepers

Kampung Keepers, an innovative and gamified application, is designed to track and celebrate the progress of GUI’s volunteers. Surveys and journals completed help GUI analyse the depth of their impact.

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Kampung Keepers 🌱

Welcome to Kampung Keepers, an innovative and gamified application designed to track and celebrate the progress of Ground Up Initiative's (GUI) volunteers. At the heart of our mission is the belief that every volunteer's contribution, no matter how small, plays a crucial role in fostering sustainable communities. Kampung Keepers provides a platform for volunteers to actively engage, share experiences, and be recognized for their dedication.

Please refer to this link to view our github page: link to github

Click this link to view our project pitch: link to google slides pitch deck

Inspiration

We thought of how to address the problem statement of allowing GUI to access the depth and nature of their impact, and realised it ultimately came down to two target audiences - the volunteers, and GUI themselves. Volunteers needed to provide feedback, so that GUI would access their impact.

Thus, we decided to do a gamified application as we found that users of applications are often motivated by achievements such as badges. Adding gamification makes the process of being more environmentally conscious a more enjoyable and motivating experience, aiding in sustaining long-term involvement. The addition of a "farm", that users can build up as they volunteer more, turns Kampung Keepers into a learning management system for volunteers, helping them keep track of how often they go down. This added a sense of accomplishment encourages them to continue logging their progress.

At the same time, GUI admins can keep track of their volunteers (since all volunteers would sign up through the system and can be tracked accurately) and also view their thoughts/reflections on their volunteer programmes, which then allows them to see the impact of their programmes.

It's a win-win situation, both encouraging volunteer input and allowing GUI admins to view their feedback.

What it does

Kampung Keepers tracks the progress of GUI's volunteers by tracking the number of volunteering sessions that volunteers attend as well as the badges that the volunteers were able to earn. Our app also records the volunteer's environmental journey before and after their first volunteering session through the use of surveys. The GUI administrator will be able to assess the depth and nature of the impact of the volunteering sessions on volunteers by looking at the statistics of the before and after survey as well as the volunteers' forum posts and environmental journal.

How we built it

We decided on building a webpage with React, using javascript as our main coding language. Css and html was also used in the development of our webpage.

Challenges we ran into

It was difficult to think of ways to try and measure/track the impact of GUI's programmes, especially since the impact on others' habits and mindsets are rarely quantifiable. After all, GUI already has a google form for volunteers to give feedback on their programmes if they wanted. However, we ultimately thought of a way we could make volunteers more inclined, or even excited, to provide their feedback by making it a game, awarding badges and providing a forum where they can interact and share their experiences with likeminded individuals.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of the ideas we have come up for this webpage, such as the gamified elements like the badges which serve as motivation for the users, and the farm, which provides a more visually engaging and fun experience.

Ultimately, we believe that Kampung Keepers is something both volunteers and GUI personnel would use - volunteers to track their personal learning journey in GUI, and GUI personnel to obtain data about their programmes and impact with direct volunteer feedback. Thus, we are proud of being able to come up with and execute such a product.

What we learned

We have learnt more about web development and the tools we can use to make a visually appealing application. As it was particularly challenging to think about how we wanted to enable GUI to "track and measure the number of people impacted by volunteering efforts, as well as assess the depth and nature of this impact", we spent a lot of time on our ideation process and ultimately learned a lot through it. The rather broad and open-ended problem statement gave us a lot of freedom to really think about what direction we wanted the platform to go in and how we could solve the problem, which gave us a lot of takeaways on how to go about brainstorming ideas and settling on them in the future.

What's next for Kampung Keepers

We look forward to developing a backend for our application as it currently only has a front end. We also look forward to introducing new features to Kampung Keepers such as a leaderboard which will rank volunteers based on the badges that they have earned. We would also like to allow the user to customise their farm with the badges they were awarded.

On the admin side, we would like to add more ways they can filter and analyse the data collected from the surveys done by volunteers. For example, not just track the overall increase in volunteers' sentiments before and after volunteering for each programme, but filter based on what they did when volunteering in GUI.

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