SkoGreen Denver: Track, understand, react

SkoGreen Denver

Track, understand, react: with SkoGreen, we hope you'll make the conscious effort to better our future and curb your CO₂ production!

Project made for HackCU VI at the University of Colorado Boulder by computer science students from Mines and Boulder.

Contributors: Katherine Aubert, Cade Crandall, Lizzie Scotty, Cole Smith

Inspiration

This project was inspired by Cade and Katherine's engineering design project for IDEAS II (HNRS115) at the Colorado School of Mines, which focuses on solving Denver's wicked traffic problem. They found in their research that there are concrete changes we can all make to reduce our footprints, and a tool to visualize it all will help motivate us all.

What it does

SkoGreen is our interpretation of the FitBit or Apple Watch for the age of conservation. Before this project, we found ourselves unaware of the impact each individual decision we make has upon the environment or concrete, actionable steps to reduce our pollution.

When you SkoGreen, you'll be able to enter your starting point and your destination and receive directions via Google Maps, tailored to your preferred form of transport (e.g, public transit, bike, car, walking). This will be logged to your Carbon Tracker and show you the pounds of CO₂ produced alongside the social cost of these emissions, the long-term damage done by carbon in USD.

A weekly graph is available for you to view your emissions over time, with plans to include better graphing to show progress over time.

How we built it

SkoGreen runs on a backend composed mostly of C++ code. We are using the Google Maps API for transportation data, and our environmental impact calculations are based off of data provided by the US Department of Energy.

We used Electron to present our webpage as a desktop application and integrate C++ into the front-end.

Challenges we ran into

Integrating the backend C++ code with the front-end was a particular challenge, considering it was new for everyone. Cole learned a lot of JavaScript and front-end technology (thanks Cole <3) for this project, and now we appreciate the front-end devs.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Learning multiple Google Maps API (for the first time!)
No git merge conflicts!
Learning heinous amounts of JS
the development of bool keepGoing4;

What we learned

None of us had any real experience with front-end development, so every part of the process was a challenge. The back-end came easy after we figured out what data we actually needed from the DOE.

We learned a lot about the complete development process and how to quickly communicate as a team to resolve errors and debug. Using APIs and JavaScript was a new skill for most of us, so we all feel a little bit more comfortable with using either in the future.

What's next for SkoGreen Denver

Given the time constraints, we didn't have as much time as we would have liked to find the best data for our projections and graphs. In the future, we want to add functionality for the user-cost of each ride on public transit or biking vs. a solo car trip.

We'd also like to expand the scope of this application to include more habits that have profound impacts (to increase its accessibility (mobile version.......!!!)