Sapling

Inspiration

Most people in the United States are not well informed about many easy steps they can take toward a more sustainable lifestyle, and how many small decisions they make have a big impact the world around them.

What it does

The app provides a fun way for users to learn a lot about sustainability practices while contributing money to charities and competing across the world and among their friends. The app is a trivia type game where users go on the app daily and answer 5 questions related to sustainability and they can see what questions they get right in comparison to the rest of the world, and are able to read more about each question. As they answer questions daily, they build up points that they can then distribute to different charities. The money to be distributed to the charities would be given to our application through donations from external companies looking to contribute, and those donations would be pooled into weekly donation buckets that the users then decided by the users using their points.

How I built it

We built the wireframes in Figma for our mobile application, which is the primary intended use case, but our functioning prototype is built in React that is backed by AWS Lambda and DynamoDB.

Challenges I ran into

We do not have a defined innovator role so it was a bit difficult getting a well written pitch and certain design and marketing aspects of our product well defined, but we worked through it using our mentors and our collective experience in industry.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

We love the idea of making learning fun with a good motivation. I'm proud of our logo and mockups.

What we learned

I learned that it's difficult to build a mobile application cross platform, and that building a marketing pitch and monetization of products is a lot more difficult than expected.