Footprints

Inspiration

Recently, a climate clock in New York City has caught everyone attention as it predicted that we only have approximately 7 years left to act before it's too late. One of the major contributors to this environmental issue is carbon footprints and every single individual living on earth plays a part. Unfortunately, not many are aware of the carbon footprint that they produce through their daily activities and this led to the creation of different carbon footprint calculator app. However, existing apps only calculate things on an annual basis and very complicated to fill (imagine that you need to recall how many miles of travel you took in a year). We believe that this kind of app should be easy to use and not such a hassle, while also assist user directly in reducing their carbon footprint consumption.

What it does

Footprints will help individuals calculating their carbon footprint consumption on a daily basis in 3 major categories (household, transportation, and food), offers a personalised recommendation on the "quick wins" actions that they can do based on their inputs, and offer a donate feature for them that will be used to fund environmental and conservation acts. With this, users will be fully aware of their significant involvement in this issue and have the chance to act straight away to offset the negative externalities that they have caused. With the app, we also involved gamification (leaderboard, badges system) and show user the history of his/her carbon footprints consumption, which will make our app more fun, enjoyable, and informative for the users.

How we built it

• Flutter: main tech stack
• Dart: for app development
• Figma: for UI design

Challenges we ran into

• Running the app in the emulator to be able to view it on both Android and iOS devices
• Converting Figma UI into flutter visuals
• Troubleshooting during Google Cloud services integration

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Successfully built main app functionalities, designed the whole app, and overcome the challenges during the hackathon.

What we learned

Effective teamwork skills, being trustworthy and responsible to the team (especially in a virtual hackathon where most people just leave in the middle of the hacks), and deeper understanding on the environmental aspects, especially related to carbon footprint consumption. Some of our team members also learned new tech stacks during the hacks.

What's next for Footprints

• Build the whole app
• Integrate machine learning for the recommendation feature
• Add more languages to improve accessibility
• Pilot launch the app
• Get some partners
• Scale the app

Built With

• dart
• figma
• flutter