Seeing Green

Inspiration

Going into BitCamp, Christopher was excited to build his first application and upon seeing the Best Educational Hack category he felt incredibly overjoyed at the chance to educate others on the principles of Sustainability. Christopher has spent multiple semesters in Sustainability focused courses for his minor, so being able to share his knowledge incredibly fortuitous. The team was going into BitCamp in order to help Christopher make his first mobile application and allow Samantha to impart knowledge onto him before graduating college. The team wanted to make the application a fun and interesting game like the "choose your own adventure" stories we grew up reading.

What it does

The application evaluates users on their daily choices as well as basic Sustainability principles in order to view their habits through the lens of Environmental Studies. Each user starts the quiz at 100 points. While progressing through a set list of questions with multiple choice responses, Seeing Green will add or deduct points based on how Environmentally Friendly the user's daily practices are. The application keeps a list of the choices made by the user in order to provide reasoning and explanations of various topics in Sustainability related to the choices made at the conclusion of the quiz. Additionally, the application tracks the user's score for each individual test they take to keep a personal leaderboard across multiple tests taken by the user.

How we built it

The team started by deciding to use the Ionic platform because of Samantha’s previous experience with it and the knowledge that this could allow our application to be built for Android, iOS, and most web browsers, from one source code. The team then used Ionic to build an Angular application through the Ionic CLI's predefined ionic start command. From there, the team modified the pre-made app.component.ts and app.component.html files in order to display the different screens required to carry out our application. Samantha created and modified the index.ts and user.service.ts files to establish Observables and other useful interfaces. The team was able to use standard ionic UI components found at https://ionicframework.com to build the application and corresponding Angular functions and variables. The team was able to make and view incremental changes to the code by running ionic serve and observing the localhost:8100 on Google Chrome browsers.

Challenges we ran into

One challenge the team faced was having to simplify the broad and detail-oriented nature of Sustainability into a few basic questions for the user to understand and respond to in a reasonable amount of time. Additionally, the team knew that most people have a basic understanding of Sustainability so the questions could also not be too simple in order to prevent users from giving what they know to be the “Best” choice as opposed to the honest one. Making an application that felt like a "choose your own adventure" story was also difficult as the team had to determine how to ensure specific answers to questions could correctly bring up different follow up questions (such as selecting that one ate meat that day would bring up a question about what type of meat, that a vegetarian would not receive) while eventually returning to a similar line of questioning.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Christopher is especially proud of being able to find an intersection of his educational passions, Computer Science and Sustainability. Christopher was proud of Seeing Green both because of its potential to educate others and because it was his first ever mobile application. The team was also incredibly proud of making the game feel like a "choose your adventure story" the team enjoyed as children. Finally, being able to effectively communicate and work together despite being siblings made the team immensely proud, especially Samantha who was excited to be able to pass down some of her knowledge to Christopher at his first ever Hackathon.

What we learned

Samantha was able to get an introduction to the vast world of Sustainability and Christopher was able to learn how to create a mobile application through the use of Angular and Ionic, this weekend.

What's next for Seeing Green

The next steps the team plans to implement are the ability to share your results with others and the ability to track other users’s scores on the leaderboard so you can compare/compete with your friends. The team also wants to create a larger pool of questions that users would get a random selection of daily and be able to create more questions that directly lead to others for more of the "choose your adventure" feeling.