PooKarma

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  This is the map where users can see all the poops cleaned up

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  In this, a user can take a picture of them cleaning up dog poop to gain credit and be on the map.

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  This is the leaderboard of people who cleaned the most poops

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  This is the splash screen

Inspiration

One day I was walking towards my bus stop in the morning. I had on my nicest sneakers and a cool outfit. Squish. As you might have guessed, I stepped in dog poop. What a horrible day! After further research, I discovered that un-picked-up dog poop is a significant contributor to the sustainability of the Earth. Firstly, When dog poop is left out on the ground, the bacteria, viruses, and parasites it contains can contaminate soil and water, causing harm to wildlife and contaminating water sources. You could be drinking bugs!

Secondly, dog poop during rainstorms can fall into lakes and water sources. Dog Poop has extremely high levels of nitrogen and phosphorus - leading to the supergrowth of algae in bodies of water or “algae blooms.” Algae blooms cover entire ecosystems and crowd out native species - reducing the quality of tasty seafood and potentially infecting it too!

After this, I knew I had to do something to make sure dog poop wouldn't infest our planet.

What it does

PooKarma has 3 parts: A map of crowd-funded poop clean up, A camera page to take a picture of your own poop clean up, A leaderboard of people with the most poops cleaned up,

Firstly, PooKarma displays a map of all the poops that have been cleaned up by the public. The goal of this page is to show users the power of teamwork and helps users visualize the goal of eventually making the Earth poop-free. Next, people can post their own poops and add them to the global map. Whenever a user takes a picture of the poop they cleaned, their geolocation and picture is stored and displayed on the map as a pin. The user is also rewarded with points that go towards a leaderboard and hopefully in the future, a store. Lastly, a global leaderboard shows people ranking of the people who picked up the most poop. It also incentivizes people to pick up more poop and gain more “clout” in the leaderboard.

How we built it

I build the project in React Native (Javascript) and used Firebase as my backend.

Challenges we ran into

The backend was extremely difficult to connect and make work in a short period of time. As a result, I scrapped a lot of the backend and used local storage and hard-coded pinpoints to display poops. This will be one of the things that will be improved upon next for PooKarma.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I am super proud that we were able to finish a whole project that somewhat works in 24 hours. I’m also super proud to have learned a lot in the challenge!

What we learned

I learned the whole process of making an app from start to end - a lot of my previous projects only took the start of a project. Here, I learned to build till the end, including how to pitch a project. It was a super valuable learning experience.

What's next for PooKarma

PooKarma’s objective in the future is to improve the incentive for users and to improve the impact it has on the Earth. First, to make more sustainable usage of dog poop, I hope to partner with a composting company. Users that send dog poop to the company will be rewarded with further rewards and the composting company will be able to combust the poop at a high temperature to make safe and sustainable fertilizer. To improve the quality of the app for users, I will next add a store. By partnering with real, sustainable stores, users will be able to use points from picking up poop to buy real things such as dog leashes and poop cleaner bags.

Built With

• firebase
• reactnative