TreeQuest - Educational tree-planting game

Inspiration

As youngsters who are concerned about environmental issues, we always want to contribute to the preservation of the Earth in some ways. However, most of our time is spent on studying and working; hence, it's hard to get ourselves actively involved in environmental activities. We then turn to taking small actions like planting a tree. It is actually a good way to help protect the environment and to make our surroundings more green and relaxing. However, it is also challenging to nurture a tree as we lack certain knowledge about them. Considering these in mind, we have come up with a solution: We will plant a digital tree! But, can a virtual tree make impacts on our real world?

What it does

We finally created an original educational-gamification mobile app about planting trees - TreeQuest. It’s fun, simple, and easy to play, but it’s also informative and helpful. It is an educational tree-planting game that allows users to grow and take care of their own virtual trees, each of which then will be converted into a real tree planted by our partner organizations. You can track how your converted trees grow up day by day and how they are gonna gradually cover the deforested areas. Also, it provides users with intriguing information and helpful tips about plants and environmental sustainability, with a view to enhancing their knowledge and awareness about environmental issues.

How we built it

First, we did research during the first day and analyzed them to build up a suitable solution to the problem of our target users. Then, based on the accumulated information, we started to brainstorm and drew a sitemap for the app on Figma in the next 2 days. Then, we started to create a prototype of it based on the sitemap with Figma and Adobe Illustrator for the visual designs.

Challenges we ran into

As we only had 2 members in the team and approximately 8 days to run the project so the workload was overwhelming. Also, both of us have no experience in coding and are quite new to Figma so we struggled a lot to learn the tools and make the game interface. It was really hard to build the interface from the scratch when you need to think create original designs and features for the game. And also the game should look appealing to the target users.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I think the first thing we are proud of is that we managed to finish the project on time to submit for this hackathon. And, the second thing is that we have overcome all the hindsights and shortfalls to create a prototype by using Figma which we haven't used before to build a game interface from scratch.

What we learned

We have learnt a lot for the past few days when we had to learn how to use the tools while working on the project. We also learnt about the trees when we had to create the visual design of some trees and a quiz for some of them. And we have learnt that teamwork makes perfect when only 2 of us could still manage to run the project smoothly.

What's next for TreeQuest - Educational tree-planting game

In the near future, we will continue to complete and update the app with several additional features, such as community, leaderboard, and so on, with a view to optimizing the experience of users. We will elaborate more on the "Tasks" in the Quests. The tasks will not only be around the game like watering the trees but also includes real-life actions which help to create green habits for users like biking or using less energy. We will try to develop a tracking app to measure that. We also plan to add some challenges where people within a local area can make beautiful DIY products from their own household recycled trash. At the end of the challenge, they can choose to keep them for personal use or to donate to us so that we will put them on sell for charity to tree planting organizations. But first, TreeQuest is planned to finish the final testing and will be ready to be launched in 03/2024.

Built With

• adobe
• figma