EcoTasker

Turning environmental protection into a gamified series of tasks.

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Inspiration

Our inspiration was the recent heatwave, a byproduct of the global warming that has been happening over the past few decades. As an individual, it is difficult to make substanstial change in the fight against climate change. The issues are highly systemic and influenced by large corporations who's energy usage overshadow the individual's. However, once connected to a large enough community, people can join together and make waves, which is what this app is all about.

What it does

Users can select a region of the world with unique environmental issues, such as water shortages, plastic pollution, or deforestation, and complete daily tasks that help contribute to resolving the issue. Some tasks include researching information about questions or reducing your carbon footprint by eating vegan for a meal. It aims to create a community of eco conscious members, allowing them to connect to organize wide scale events. You can also compete with them through the leaderboard system.

How we built it

We built EcoTracker completely with SwiftUI. From the start, we built one feature at a time and added on top of them.

Challenges we ran into

Our lack of familiarity with Swift and IOS development made the entire project pretty challenging. Debugging was incredibly difficult and time consuming, especially while sleep deprived, leading to some frustrating moments and features that were never implemented. Getting the layout right for the daily tasks was difficult, as well. Finally, managing all of the Views and how everything connected was very confusing, especially because we did almost everything on a single file.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of getting a functioning app done within the time period with only two people in the team. We didn't have much experience with Swift beforehand, so it was a struggle at first—the learning curve was slightly steep. The whole UI turned out better than expected as well, which was a nice bonus.

What we learned

To use multiple files! It makes life much easier and finding things quicker, something that would have been helpful when tiried. We also learned a lot about IOS development in general, ranging from how the different V, H, Z Stacks worked to the different Views available. Being our first and second in-person hackathon between our team members, we also learned to fit in naps to optimize perfomance.

What's next for EcoTasker

There are many features we'd like to implement in the future given more time. By giving some advertising space to companies, we are able to further incentivize users to complete tasks by offering monetary rewards. There could be coins users can earn and then donate to a resolving an issue.

We also want to have a chatbot using the OpenAI API that allows users to ask questions about environmental stewardship (eg: what bin do glass bottles go into?). We could let them customize the avatar based on areas they have completed/saved, like a coral reef pet for Australia.

Built With

  • swiftui
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