Pocket Park

Inspiration

Pocket Park was partially inspired by apps such as eBird, which is an app birdwatchers use in order to track birdwatching lists. The eBird app is run based off of a primarily trust-based system where users log their location and the birds in it, which influenced the system used for tracking people picking up trash. It was also inspired by apps like Pokemon Go, which were able to take large sedentary parts of the population and convince them to go outside, something this app aims to use for a force for good.

What it does

Pocket Park is based around each user's personal virtual park, which is linked to a real, local park. By going to the real-world park and picking up litter, you earn points that you can use to customize your virtual park (based around the time you spend in the park).

How we built it

The website is built with React, Heroku, and node.js. It is built almost entirely through HTML, Javascript, and CSS. The map system uses the MapBox API in order to find the user's location and to find local parks. The Pocket Park phone demo was built entirely in Figma.

Challenges we ran into

The initial system involved users just submitting trash reports on their parks, relying on trust 100%. However, this would be hard to moderate at all, and so after brainstorming some concepts (such as forcing users to take a picture of the trash they collected and using an AI to verify it) I switched to the current system where the user has to at least be in the park, since I was already using MapBox API in order to first select the park anyways. This system is a balance between trusting the user and verifying that the user actually went to the park.