PlanetProtector

PlanetProtector is a web application that embeds three mini-games made with Scratch that aim to educate children on key facts about global warming in a fun and engaging way.

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Inspiration

Since the theme for the hackathon was education, we wanted to focus on a topic that would teach future generations about a growing issue that everyone is and will continue to face on Earth; global warming. The best way to do this was to make an educational game that targeted elementary school children and taught them about the causes of global warming and gave them the power to ‘fight back’ by making interactive minigames where they could stop and reverse global warming.

What it does

The project is a web application, which would be an internet-accessible website to an end. user, which contains an environment-themed interactive game for students to play through, and includes three mini games based on sub-topics on climate change, such as vehicle emissions, deforestation and clean energy.

How we built it

We developed the three mini games in Scratch. For the web page that embeds the games, we used HTML, CSS, Bootstrap and Javascript for front-end and NodeJS, express.js and MongoDB for backend.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge we had to deal with was finding an effective platform to develop and prototype games. Initially we were deciding on using javaScript but we decided to go with Scratch as it was an easy environment to get a game working and was embed-friendly. Also, the design of the games and the web application took us a long time because we want to make sure that user's experience should be both fun and educational.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We managed to think of an effective, gamified solution to education that would help raise awareness about a major issue and we were able to execute it efficiently. We were also able to developed 3 mini-games as well as a full-stack web application within the tight time constraints.

What we learned

We also ended up learning a lot about climate change ourselves as we did the research for this project, along with learning more about the frameworks we were working with and collaborating with tools such as git.

What's next for Planet Protector

We want to make Planet Protector official, which means refining all the games, coming up with a story to pair with the games and having a real incentive for children to complete the mini games, such as partnering with a nonprofit that can plant trees for each game played by a student. It is currently deployed as a free instance on Render, and we want to deploy it on a custom domain like planetprotector.online.

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