Preview in Swift for HomeView.
Preview in Swift for BuildAffectionView.
Preview in Swift for LoginView.
Figma design page

Inspiration

Our team was inspired by the fast-growing amount of extinct and endangered animals in the world. According to the IUCN Red List, we currently have 42,100 animal species threatened with extinction. Being more sensitive and vulnerable to environmental change than human beings, animals are suffering from the ongoing global climate change. A significant catalyst of this change lies in the behaviors of individuals that are unaware of how their daily actions could possibly harm, but also potentially benefit our environment.

Pure statistical numbers are usually hard to relate for people. Therefore, in order to raise awareness of these endangered animals, we conceived the idea to build a mobile app to offer users the opportunity to raise endangered animals by themselves. This hands-on experience would allow the users to build close emotional connections to their animals, and further to increase their consciousness of the environment.

How we built it

To provide a visual presentation of our project, we used figma to prototype the layout, features and flows of our app. We also began coding our implementation of the app using Swift, but given the time constraints, were not able to fully implement it.

Challenges we ran into

One of our biggest challenges was to narrow down our focus, given that environmental issues are too big and complex of a topic to tackle with just one app. During our early stage of ideation, we also wanted to include the loss of trees and plants as a result of industrial development, but then we decided to narrow our scope down to environmental changes that directly threaten the survival of animal species.

Another challenge we faced was the limited time we had. Most of us have little to no experience implementing an actual app through code, so we did a lot of learning during this experience.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of the variety of the tools we were able to deploy to make our ideas come to life, and our progress within the last 24 hours.

What we learned

During our development of this project, we learned a lot about endangered species, and how human activities on the environment have been threatening them. We also learned to design both applicable and aesthetic app pages.

What's next for PawPals

The next step is to further optimize our app UI design, take into account user experience and psychology more and implement frontend code to make it a fuller app. We are also hoping to add more cool features, such as photo sharing, which prompts users to take pictures of them doing a task like picking up garbage at the beach and share them with their friends; and donation to funds that focuses on helping endangered species to build a stronger sense of community and remind and motivate people to take real actions