Satiate

Satiate acts as a digital speed bump for junk food cravings. It blocks unhealthy sites until you score >90% on an SDG 3 quiz, turning impulsive clicks into healthy reflections.

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Inspiration

In today's fast-paced digital world, ordering junk food takes just a few clicks. The frictionless nature of these platforms preys on our impulses, directly opposing the goals of SDG 3 (Good Health and Well-being). We wanted to build a tool that introduces healthy friction—forcing a moment of mindfulness and education between a craving and a transaction.

What it does

Satiate acts as a behavioral lockdown for your browser. Whenever a user attempts to visit a recognized junk food or unhealthy lifestyle website, the extension immediately blocks the page content. To regain access, the user is forced to take a 10-question educational quiz centered around SDG 3 health facts. Here is the catch: you must score strictly greater than 90% to pass. We wanted to ensure users couldn't just blindly guess their way through. To illustrate the friction mathematically, the probability of passing a 10-question quiz (assuming 4 options per question) by pure guessing is astronomically low: This strict mathematical barrier forces the user to genuinely engage with the health content, often breaking the impulsive craving entirely before they can access the site.

How we built it

We built Satiate using vanilla JavaScript, HTML, and CSS, utilizing the modern Chrome Extension Manifest V3 architecture. The core logic relies on background configurations and content scripts (content.js) to seamlessly inject the quiz UI directly into the DOM of the restricted site, effectively locking the underlying content. State and quiz data are managed via chrome.storage.

Challenges we ran into

One of the biggest hurdles was ensuring the injected lockdown overlay loaded instantaneously before the target junk food site could render any tempting visuals. Troubleshooting the content script injection and ensuring the UI looked clean and modern over any given website's native CSS took a lot of fine-tuning. Transitioning the logic to comply with the strict security policies of Manifest V3 was also a solid learning curve for us.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are incredibly proud of successfully turning a standard web blocker into an educational tool. Instead of just saying "No," Satiate says "Learn this first." Getting the dynamic quiz generation, score validation, and unlock mechanics to work flawlessly within a sandboxed extension environment was a major win for the team.

What we learned

We gained a deep understanding of browser extension architecture, specifically how content scripts interact with the host page's DOM while remaining isolated from its JavaScript environment. We also learned how to effectively design behavioral interventions that actively disrupt established digital habits.

What's next for Satiate

In the future, we plan to implement a dynamic backend API to constantly update the SDG 3 quiz bank so the questions never get repetitive. We also want to add personalized analytics, showing users how many impulsive orders they've successfully avoided over time.

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