My Carbon Score

My Carbon Score aims to educate and grade users on their carbon emissions and wastewater through a convenient medium, dynamic interaction, visual metrics, & obtainable goals with realistic strategies

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Inspiration

Environmental activism is not a trend, and the issues surrounding it have grown to a global scale. The word “sustainable” has become more rare with the increasing emissions of greenhouse gasses, and the consumption-driven lifestyle led by humans goes unchecked and is easily written off and forgotten.

Making a change to be more sustainable is hard enough and finding the way to do it shouldn’t make the job any harder, so minimalism is a virtue in this project. Make a personal difference and check out your carbon score today to see where you stand in doing your part!

What it does

Hi! My name is Keegan Murphy and I’m a Junior at the University of Minnesota. Today I’ll be showing you My Carbon Score, a mobile app designed to help users monitor and mitigate their environmental impact, carbon footprint, and water consumption.

Although you can’t force a person to monitor their environmental impact, My Carbon Score aims to break down this daunting and complicated commitment through an accessible, minimalistic medium. Users can download the app and answer only four questions to immediately get their estimated carbon emissions score. By targeting only the most important factors impacting a person's carbon footprint through one of the most accessible smartphone mediums, the barrier to entry is lower and easier to participate in for the average person. There is also summarized information provided in the app to give tips and help bring the user's emissions down. To keep environmental impact on a user's mind without it being nagging or annoying, they can also press the notifications button to get weekly notifications sent to their phone. All these features are on one page: there is no waiting on loading, complicated questions, digging for information, and confusion.

The second page of this app mimics many of the features of the first page such as the score calculator, summarized information, and notifications, but it scores the users Waster Usage instead of their Carbon Emissions. Since a large carbon footprint and rampant water consumption are some of the biggest issues at a personal level, this app specifically targets those issues and ignores all the "ifs and buts" of personal environmental impact.

How we built it

Swift, SwiftUI, developed in XCode and sourced through Github There is a README file on Github for instructions on running the app on a simulator through XCode (mac).

Challenges we ran into

Implementing multiple views bug-free was a challenge, but that was sorted out by adding a root view handler. Also, implementing functions and algorithms with state-based variables is a new, interesting way of thinking that took some time to script out. Trying to make an app "look good" is also a challenge with the high standard for UI/UX on iPhones, but I feel I met the challenge.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I started learning Swift/iOS development at the beginning of this hackathon to fit with my idea (I was originally just going to use a frontend stack) and this app is a timeline of my progress. I combined several views and planned out how the UI/UX would look now that I also started learning Figma. I also implemented functions to modify variables according to custom equations to implement complex calculations.

What we learned

I mainly learned two things: how to craft an app out of thin air from a sketch and simple idea, and that I enjoy iOS development.

What's next for My Carbon Score

My Carbon Score belongs on the app store for free, and I'm ready to sign up for the apple developer program to make that happen. If I get just one person to reduce their Carbon Emissions or water use because of my app, this project was worth it!

Thank you to Tech Optimum for hosting this awesome event!

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