Learning E-Waste

Inspiration

E-waste (electronic waste) is a growing problem in our world today. Every year, we generate about 50 million tons of waste, which is equal to throwing a thousand laptions per second. If not disposed of properly, toxic wastes from E-waste such as lead, furans, PCB, and dioxins can get into our environment and cause health issues. Some health effects from electronic waste are birth defects, impaired nervous systems, and damaged internal organs. Our goal with this project is to educate people about e-waste and how to dispose of common electronics we use on the daily properly.

What it does

This is a friendly, interactive game that aims to teach players about safe and responsible ways to reduce and recycle e-waste. Players can click through the game to learn about the common process for recycling everyday electronics, and test their newfound knowledge at the end with a fun quiz.

How we built it

We built our game using unity game engine and we mainly focused on using the text mesh pro UI package within unity to do the majority of the game. We also built some custom scripts to control the states, and used VS code and C#. Graphics were designed by hand using Procreate, in order to give a friendly, DIY feel to communicate that it doesn’t take something special or flashy to make a difference in the world. Image resizing was done using gim.

Challenges we ran into

One challenge was scaling images to have a consistent aspect ratio; we couldn’t really do that due to limitations of the text mesh pro canvas. We were also lacking knowledge on some aspects of unity that we needed; since it’s such a complex engine it’s hard to be familiar with all of its functions. In the end, we were unable to complete a major aspect of the game, the quiz, due to time constraints and technical difficulties.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We’re all beginner hackers (two of us are completely new to programming), so we’re proud that we were able to produce an interactive game in such a short time frame. We accomplished a lot, from research, programming, to producing all of our own assets.

What we learned

It was interesting to work with a lot more UI elements in Unity. Another insight was how to work with a new team in such a short time frame. The workshops were also very interesting; we learned about manipulating Chat GPT using current time data, and how to get started designing user interfaces with Figma.

What's next for Recycle E-Waste

In the future, we hope to be able to finish the quiz portion of our game so that we can provide a more interactive and educational experience for the user.