Treoguessr

Inspiration

Air pollution is a major health concern in the UK, with air quality regularly exceeding legal limits. This is the UK's biggest health threat, estimated to contribute towards 40,000 premature deaths per year and costing the UK economy upwards of £20 billion annually.

We wanted to spread awareness about this issue, particularly due to our location in a major industrial city with less green space than the general population would like. Along with absorbing high amounts of greenhouse gases, the urban planting of trees also beautifies neglected urban areas, encourages communities to spend more time outdoors, creates new habitats for wildlife, reduces issues and flooding caused by major rainfall and generally improves the value of a neighbourhood.

What it does

Treoguessr is a new and exploratory way to show you how air pollution affects our world and how trees can help us fix it through visual inputs. We show you a place in our world. You click the map to tell us where you thinks it needs trees the most. We calculate how much trees would have helped clear the air where you chose, and calculate your score based off of the AQI (Air Quality Index) of your chosen point in contrast to the mean AQI of the area surrounding the point.

How we built it

Step 1:
Spent the first hour preparing and planning the project, ensuring we understood what we wanted to build and aspirations for the future of the app.
Step 2:
Split into two groups:
1) Back-end/API Team (Luca and Na) - used Google Cloud APIs (Static Maps, Air Pollution) in order to fetch maps, air pollution data and analysed it .
2) Front-end Team (Stanley and Yusuf) - used Typescript, Next.js, Tailwind to present the maps and data to the user.
Step 3:
Conducted sprints, aiming to re-merge every 2 hours in order to reduce code merging issues and to review our progress together.
Step 4:
Finally linking both ends up fully - working collaboratively to integrate and debug together😊

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Raring for a challenge, we decided to use unfamiliar technology, both with the frontend languages and with the APIs. We initially began slowly, and picked up our pace as we furthered our understandings in these technologies and have successfully overcome this hurdle. As we formed a team at the last minute, we also are proud of how well we worked and communicated with each other, and the results we produced.

Challenges we ran into

As it was our first time using these technologies, we ran into many bugs. Particularly with fetching data from external sources and the learning curve when learning new technology. We overcame these through time, dedication and love <3 (And more specifically, working together and bouncing ideas around.) Additionally, the Google Air Pollution API is very newly released and is not well documented or mentioned online. So it took longer than expected to overcome the learning curve.

What's next for Treoguessr

For future versions of Treoguessr, we envision an application with many more new and exciting features! The features we intended to put in but didn't have time were:

An option to specify on specific areas of the world
Leaderboard
Profile Page
Further develop our statistics on trees and air pollution, including improving our algorithm on calculating the number of trees required to reduce air pollution to a healthier level in any area and furthering our scoring algorithm by factoring in practical tree placements, types of trees and whether they are native to the land etc.
Collecting data on where users believe are the best places to place trees, along with algorithms calculating the most optimal locations and collate this data in order to advise urban planners on where to plant more trees
We aimed to incorporate heatmaps however the resolution was not as clear as we would have liked, we would like to create our own heatmaps by pulling air pollution data and analysing it.