RecycleQuest

Home Screen
Trivia Screen
Results Screen
Leaderboard Screen
Profile Screen
Camera Screen (pre-picture)
Camera Screen (post-picture)

Inspiration

After getting our group of five together and conducting a meeting to discuss our app ideas, we landed on the goal of recycling. Our city, New Bern, is surrounded by two rivers: the Neuse and Trent Rivers. The Neuse River runs through the heart of the city, and it has been reported that 50% of the total dissolved material transported was inorganic pollution. This problem will continue to rise as the ever-growing population in the area increases. We wanted to create an app that helped to mitigate the trash being thrown into the rivers.

What it does

Our app entices people to recycle and throw away trash correctly. By "gamifying" the experience, it would make the task more enjoyable and increase participation. The app consists of a login/sign-in system, a leaderboard, a live feed of posts (similar to Instagram), a calendar, levels/ranks, and different recycle quests. All of these features hope to entice people to recycle more.

How we built it

Our group of five was divided into three programmers (front-end, back-end, and full-stack) and two creative designers and videographers. By using and learning React Native, Expo, Python, Render, GoogleAPI, Flask, and Gunicorn, the programmers constructed the app. The creative designers and videographers utilized Ibis Paint X, Picsart, Canva, and CapCut to create the app mockup and pitch video.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into a handful of challenges when constructing the app:

Since we were all high school students, we had difficulty scheduling times and places where we could all meet. A lot of us had after-school activities or at-home responsibilities. We tried to meet once every week and it was difficult working around everyone's schedules.
While researching recycling in our area, we realized that every county/area had different recycling rules. For example, some places recycle plastic bags while others won't accept them at all. We had to decide that we wanted the app to focus on our area specifically and follow its recycling regulations.
The programmers had to learn new programming techniques and applications to make the app. It pushed us out of our comfort zone and allowed for collaborative thinking and learning.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of many accomplishments:

We managed to meet once every week and had good communication.
We successfully implemented all of the features we set out for.
Working together on a coding project can be hard but we learned how to collaborate and integrate all of our code and knowledge.
The pitch video not only shows a demonstration of our app but also our creative and comedic side. We felt that this was what made it come together so well.

What we learned

We ran into many lessons during the process:

How to utilize and add React Native, Python, Render, GoogleAPI, Flask, and Gunicorn to our toolboxes.
How to effectively schedule meetings with our team.
How to keep good communication and teamwork skills.

What's next for RecycleQuest

To better prepare our app for the future, we plan to integrate Artificial intelligence properly to work with our camera. We also hope to use our backend server to more accurately display user data or even all users with our leaderboard. In the future, we hope to add a second leaderboard which will be more localized by county.

Not only that, but the location restriction was a huge concern when creating the app. For future improvements, we hope to be able to utilize the user's location to determine what is recyclable in their area, rather than using a general machine learning model.