Leafari - Pokemon Go for Plants

🌱 Inspiration

My four kids and I dreamed up Leafari to help people reconnect with nature through AI. We believe that the more you know your local ecology, the more you’ll care for it. We didn’t just want another plant-ID tool - we wanted an adventure that lures kids (and grown-ups) off the couch, out the door, and into the wild. Picture Pokémon GO’s exploration energy blended with Duolingo’s bite-sized learning loops, but focused on botany and ecology.

🛠️ How We Built It

Development window: 6 days total (two long weekends). Dad coded; kids served as product managers and QA testers, brainstorming quests, ranks, and UI tweaks. Bolt.new made it possible by getting the entire app scaffolded and the foundation set in one day.

🚀 What We Learned

1. Kid-driven PM is gold. Their curiosity surfaced delightful features adults overlook.
   
2. AI is a creative teammate. Prompt engineering can turn models into badge artists and field-guide authors.
   
3. Scope is everything. A tight, badge-driven MVP beats a sprawling feature list when time is scarce.

⚔️ Challenges Faced

Dynamic Badge Generation

The big dragon. Crafting prompts that yield consistent, on-brand badge art took many iterations. We ended up building a mini workflow that:

1. Feeds plant traits into GPT-4o → gets back a PNG.
   
2. Post-processes in JS to remove background.
   
3. Stores the final PNG in Convex and on device for instant in-app rendering.

This means the amount of plant badges is vast, as the users will be generating them. Future user that discover an plant that already has a badge will load the existing badge and plant information. The users are making our badges and plant library for us!

Time Crunch

With two weeks left in the hackathon - and real life happening - every hour mattered. Continuous delivery via Expo’s OTA updates saved us countless App Store review cycles.

🌍 Impact & Next Steps

Leafari already turns a neighborhood walk into a wild plant quest - capture, identify, collect, repeat. Next we’ll:

• Launch reinforcement games and quizzes to reinforce the learning of the plants they already discovered
• Add multiplayer “expeditions” so friends can team-up to map local biodiversity.
  
• Integrate seasonal challenges
  
• Partner with organizations for special events around invasive and endangered species

Our hope: a new generation of citizen naturalists who learn, and fall in love with, the living world right outside their door.

Built With

• bolt.new
• convex
• cursor
• expo.io
• gemini
• openai
• openrouter
• react-native
• revenue-cat