The Sustainable Schedule

Inspiration

Our Story: Glittering snowflakes fell on my face as I walked alongside my friends. The white snow crunched beneath my boots and a cool breeze whipped across my face. The crisp air was refreshing and the contagious feeling of excitement spread amongst our group as I bent to shovel snow in the shape of a snowball in preparation for battle... Our fond memories of Canadian winters have stuck with us to this day. The memorable snow fights and fond memories have spurred us to create this initiative. Global warming has changed our country, and every year we get less and less snow. The weather gets warmer, and the snow days and piles of snow we'd jump in are now rare. We want to change this for our generation, and generations to come. We want to preserve the beauty of our world and create a sustainable, bright, and snowy future.

We were also inspired by the quote “small things done with great love will change the world,” by Mother Teresa as it helped us establish the goal of the app. We realized that sometimes trying to tackle an entire issue at once is not the solution but creating sustainable solutions to sustainability problems is the way to go - and that means starting small and doing it with care.

We also rely heavily on planning apps, so we thought; "why not combine planning apps with our love for sustainable living and our environment?"

We hope to transform everyday tasks into an opportunity to improve the environment. We want people to change the way they navigate the world, even if it's as simple as using reusable cutlery. Our reminders in response to scheduled tasks allow people to make better choices. The popularity of planners today also creates a diverse and wide platform with thousands of people on which we can reach more people and impact more lives

What it does

Now, more than ever, people rely on technology to manage their lives, from scheduling a shopping run to planning a meeting.

Planning apps are, consequently, a platform that can reach thousands of people; where do we come in? We can use this outreach to preserve our communities. Our planning app allows people to use this app like any other scheduling platform, with the addition of helpful reminders relating to each scheduled task that helps sustain environmental health.

For example, going shopping? Remember to bring your reusable bags, maybe even consider a gas-saving option such as using public transit or walking. Everyday tasks can help eliminate the average of 335g of single-use plastic we use daily.

How we built it

We built our app preview using Canva and screencastify to present our pitch.

Challenges we ran into

As hackathon novices, we struggled with the design element of our app. Unfortunately, we were unable to create an actual app, however, we created a sample of what we hope for it to look like. In the future, we hope to find someone who is able to help code this app.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of the possibilities and potential of our idea; It is a very successful proposal and we have no doubt that we can see it get far. In the little time we had, we were excited to create a unique idea that has the potential to attract the attention of people, particularly youth, and create more sustainable practices in our day-to-day lives.

What we learned

We learned a lot about environmental disasters and the effects of little, irresponsible everyday actions on the environment from our extensive research. We also learned, through research some ways we are able to easily eliminate single-use plastic from our lives.

What's next for The Sustainable Schedule

We hope to expand our audience by introducing it into a small group of youth to see how they respond to our idea. Our hope is to get feedback as well as continue our search for someone who can help us with app design.

About Our Team

Chelsea and Hidayah are two individuals who attend high school and have come together through our passion for tackling environmental issues, specifically by finding local solutions. Our unique backgrounds and experiences have allowed us to come up with a creative app that we believe would be trendy and help others build sustainable habits. We have only met recently through a competition we are competing in together at school and the OATHE Challenge was an opportunity for us hopefully secure funding to run a community awareness initiative in our school.

The OATHE challenge was an amazing chance to see two people who have very different perspectives create something that addresses what we each regarded as important. Designing this app for many people means catering to different people's needs and having a similar dynamic represented in our team was crucial in developing this app proposal.

Chelsea's background in event planning and participating in environmental activism allowed her to understand the value of not only sustainable living but the importance of time management. Hidayah's background in environmental issues and amazing literature skills helped to design a proposal that combined factual information with being able to verbalize our motivations for creating this app.

During our brainstorming sessions, we were inspired by our Canadian winters, or the lack thereof. We figured that we cannot reverse some of the climate change that is happening but we can mitigate the continuation of these climate effects by reducing carbon sinks by limiting the amount of single-use plastic that goes back into the environment. We hope that this app plays a part in not only restoring our Canadian identity of snowy winters but ingraining sustainable habits into our daily lives and creating a new and environmentally-friendly norm.

Built With

• brain
• canva
• screencastify