Recal

An app that rewards you for safe disposal of used masks

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Inspiration

The additional level of pollution on beaches and local environment due to disposable masks which at times could be infected. In some of the less economically developed countries, some even started reselling used masks picked up in random locations putting everyone else at risk.

What it does

Our application has two parts 1) The admin app -Institutions register for the service if they give out disposable masks to their students or employees and they get an admin portal that allows them to see stats for collected masks and masks returned for safe disposal

-When clients are collecting masks, the institution will use the portal to generate a one time use qr code that the user scans and their account information gets updated to show they completed a collection

-When clients return masks, the institutions carries out a similar procedure to the above but this time the qr code generated will be specific for returning masks, After scanning this code, the client will get their profile updated and they will also get points added which they can redeem later

2)The client application -Users signup using their preferred method from the options offer on the Auth0 authentication page and they become members

-The clients will just have to scan a qr code when they are collecting or returning masks for them to earn points that they will redeem later for services at any of the businesses that partner with us

How I built it

Out team had four members all working on different sections of the project so we divided roles into back-end, mobile, admin and UI/UX development

-For the server, our team used Express, Node.js and MongoDB to create a rest api which also will also ideally incorporate the use of Socket.io to carry out faster and real time updates

-For the admin portal and dashboard, we used Gatsby and React then hosted is on Vercel

-Our mobile app is built using the Ionic framework with the intention of making it a cross-platform application

Challenges I ran into

-The biggest challenge was having everyone on the team learning new technologies in a remote environment so it would take time to figure out how that specific technology will be used by multiple parts of the application without conflict for example using Auth0 for authentication on the application front-end and back-end

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

-The first accomplishment was coming up with an idea we all agreed on as a team early enough into the hackathon so we didn't have to waste significant time brainstorming

What I learned

-The whole team learned how to collaborate effectively by creating a clear plan for the project from the first day and quickly identifying key areas of strength and focusing on those areas throughout the project for each member

What's next for Recal

  • After the current application's completion, we plan on getting our first batch of sponsors for rewards and institutions that would like to try out the collection and return system for their college campuses

  • We plan on taking Recal beyond just collecting and returning face masks, the next step will be allowing institutions to keep track of different products at the same time and also include the option of creating custom rewards

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