SustainableMe

CONFIRMATION: We are an officially registered team for Melbourne Hack 2021
Tony Dang
Cindy Lin
Stephen He
Jennifer Xiang

We started this project in the early hours of Saturday morning (after the official start of the hackathon!) after a long round of discussions and efforts to get used to new technologies!

Inspiration

As 4 students each studying different areas of STEM, we all aim to help the world tackle its most challenging problems. Living sustainably is not easy - there are a lot of things that we can do, but it's hard to get started with the lack of information on how to be eco-friendly. This is where our inspiration came from - a way to inspire you to complete simple yet impactful daily tasks to help you live sustainably while learning and having fun at the same time!

What it does

Our project is an iOS mobile app that aims to promote a more sustainable lifestyle by prompting users with daily tasks that they can complete and educating them about their impact on the environment. In addition to this, we gamified this experience with the creation of an interactive pet in the app. Users earn rewards for completing sustainable tasks, and can then buy gifts for their pets.

How we built it

We used Swift and UIKit to develop our iOS application, with the help of XCode as our development environment, and Github for collaboration.

Challenges we ran into and accomplishments that we're proud of

As we were all new to Xcode and Swift, it was an uphill battle trying to learn how to use not only an entirely new programming language but also an entirely new IDE. Taking on these new technologies meant that we had many challenges in developing the application, and at one stage, even considered switching to making a website, which was something we were more familiar with. In the end, we persevered through the frustrating yet oh-so-rewarding experience of learning to program in a completely new way for everyone on the team. Another challenge we faced was with Apple’s deployment program. Unfortunately, due to Apple’s strict deployment process, which can take up to 48 hours, we couldn’t risk deploying and being late to the submission. Thus, we have provided a link to our Github page, where the judging panel can clone and execute the application on a MacOS environment.

What we learned

We learned to work better together as a team, and communicate with each other effectively to have everyone be their most productive self. Needless to say, we learned a lot about the technologies used in mobile development, specifically iOS development. Furthermore, we improved our ability to develop in a collaborative manner using best practices of version control and branching. A big part of our success was our ability to scope and re-scope the product that we were making, making sure that we were tackling the stream of our choice while having reasonable and achievable goals. We were able to achieve all of this by having a positive attitude and working together as a group of true friends.

What's next for SustainableMe

We planned to create an achievements system where we would have different metrics to measure your sustainability performance over time. These metrics may include: your streak of 3-daily-tasks completed, your estimated Carbon reduction, and the number of trees you would have saved, among other statistics. We also had plans for aPet Evolution system where pets could evolve with enough care given to them, and if you reach a certain milestone, they might even give you gifts in return! This is all in addition to purchasable pet accessories, a leaderboard to compete with friends, and of course, more pets!

Final messages

In the end, we are all extremely proud to have an end product to show off to the judges and hope that you will find inspiration in our product to become more sustainable in your own daily lives!