Sustainable Sprout

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Inspiration

As Computer Science majors, we understand the struggle of not leaving your cave when you code endlessly for a large portion of your lifetime. The value we give as Computer Science majors to the tech industry is astronomically large; however, what if we use the same effort into bettering the environment? Many coders and engineers stay cooped up in their office, and then going home after fulfilling the 9-to-5 shift. We have created an app that would help guide people with busy lives into putting in the effort to make the world cleaner and more beautiful for the future generations to witness.

What it does

The application we have created gives users a daily task list with the opportunity of completing them for both in-game and real-life rewards (Of course, the real-life reward is self-explanatory!). The daily task list gives the user 4 easy tasks every 24 hours that they can complete to make their daily life a little more environmentally friendly. With each task completed, the user gains exp points and levels up, along with a beautiful tree growing with the player's level. On every level up the user will also earn gold that they can use to buy cosmetic items to customize their island and give more incentive to complete your tasks. There are also achievements that help track important milestones in your sustainability journey.

How we built it

We built this app using Django with a python backend and an Angular frontend. We made custom art assets for the cosmetics and the tree, and used the on-board sqlite3 database that comes with Django to store user data.

Challenges we ran into

None of us had ever made an app using custom assets before, so planning out, drawing, and implementing the art was a struggle. This is also the most complex full-stack app any of us have ever made. We ran into some big setbacks with both managing all the user data in the backend and applying that data in the frontend. There were a lot of features we had planned for the frontend specifically that we had to scrap because we could not get them to work properly.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The biggest thing we're proud of is creating a working app of this scope. It was a huge challenge, but we managed to pull it off (despite sacrificing a lot of sleep). It was hard to not give up given how many things had to come together to make the art, frontend, and backend cooperate with each other, but we kept going and are very proud of the result.

What we learned

Two of us had a little experience with Django before this, but had used it sub-optimally before. For this project we were able to really get the best out of Django's features and use the database to it's full potential. We also learned how to save a lot of time by using cURL to test endpoints in the backend so that we know they work by the time the frontend is ready (of couse it didn't always go that smoothly). We also learned how to manage a lot of endpoints and the importance of extensive planning well before we actually start coding (and drawing in this case).

What's next for tree app

In the future, we would like to add more cosmetics, achievements, tasks, and potentially animations to the art. We will add challenges that represent long-term sustainability goals and provide greater rewards. We would also link to actual articles about sustainability efforts to keep the user informed. Another goal would be a friend system where you can add friends and see their islands. Also adding skins, more tree variations, a daily login system to earn rewards, a day/night cycle, and seasons that match real life seasons were things we considered.

Built With

• angular.js
• django
• python
• typescript