Inspiration
The inspiration to create SustainEd came from the UN's Sustainable Development Goals especially the ones promoting Sustainable Cities and Communities and Responsible Consumption and Production. University students lead busy lives, and are often in poor financial situations, and hence focus on finding the cheapest option. They almost never consider sustainability. SustainED provides university students with an incentive to be more sustainable through its rewards system and ease of access.
What it does
SustainED encourages students to be more sustainable through its four main functionalities - Maps, Rewards, Marketplace, and Sustainability. The maps feature provides directions to students for water fountains, recycling points, and donation bins where they can donate things they no longer need. The rewards feature provides students with the incentive to be more sustainable by awarding them points for recycling, using sustainable alternatives to products, donating items, etc. These points can be saved up to earn rewards around the university campus. This feature recommends sustainability shops to students looking to lead a more sustainable life. This feature allows students to sell their things to other students in need.
How we built it
SustainEd is built using The Holy Trinity of web development - HTML, CSS, and Javascript. We used VS Code as our text editor and GitHub to host our project.
Challenges we ran into
For the majority of us this was our first hackathon and all of us were inexperienced in web development and had never worked with some of these languages before, we ran into many designing issues. We struggled with responsive image resizing, the dynamic progress bar, dropdowns, and fonts. But in the end, we were able to achieve the vision we had started with.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are particularly proud of our integrated maps feature, dynamic progress bar, expandable shop descriptions with directions, and the carousel feature among many others. We are most importantly proud of our progress as a team in building a project from scratch in an area of tech we weren't familiar with.
What we learned
We learned to create a web development project from the ground up. We learned how to code cool features like dropdown menus, progress bars, carousels, and map integration. Also, we learned how to divide responsibilities and integrate everything together in the end to create a fully functioning website.
What's next for SustainEd
SustainED is just a mockup right now, but in the future we want to work towards a fully functioning website. In the future, we would try to include more ways that students can earn rewards. For example, we want to include a system where students get rewards at the university stores for purchasing more sustainable alternatives. The receipt of the purchase can include a code that they can enter into the website for reward points. At the moment, the website is only for UOE students but in the future, we could look into making it accessible to the public.
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