Verdant

Verdant is a social media app that promotes sustainability through the completion of challenges. Users can compare achievements as well as work individually or together to care for their "biome".

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Inspiration

We were mainly inspired by productivity apps such as Forest, in which users are rewarded with the growth of a plant for staying focused and can also "plant together" with other people. We wanted users to be able to see their progress in a similar fashion as well as be able to work jointly with friends.

What it does

Verdant is a social media application that allows users to take on different challenges that are all related to sustainability or make them engage in a nature-related activity. For example, they range from carpooling to planting a tree to organizing a cleanup, and so on. Users can also connect with friends and compare achievements or view each other's activities and progress. With each month comes a new Monthly Challenge, going slightly further than regular ones as it educates users and walks them through a certain topic: for example, learning to compost. Additionally, when a user first joins, they pick out one endangered animal that will allow them to track their progress. By continuing to take part in challenges regularly, they are keeping the chosen animal and its biome "safe"; however, in the opposite case, they will be endangering said biome. The goal is to push the users to care for their respective animals, allowing them to become more "green" in the process. Finally, a collaborative mode also exists, allowing friends to merge their biomes and take on challenges together, ensuring the well-being of both of their animals simultaneously.

How we built it

We started by brainstorming and creating an outline within Figma and then split the work into two parts: the creation of the entire app prototype in Figma and that of part of what the website implementation could look like using HTML/CSS.

Challenges we ran into

One first challenge that we ran into was in regards to our group: one of our team members lived in a different time zone, making it slightly hard for us to all collaborate, and, unfortunately, ended up dropping out of the team due to other personal complications. Those of us working on making the website in HTML and CSS also faced technical difficulties when trying to work jointly on the same code.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

One main accomplishment that we could all be proud of, other than the technical skills we all learned, was having participated in our first hackathon!

What we learned

We were each able to learn at least one new skill over the last hours: one of us learned to use HTML for the first time, another created their first collaborative project using GitHub, and the last was able to discover many of Figma's prototyping functionalities (mainly scrolling).

What's next for Verdant

Verdant's next steps would be the creation of an actual app based on the prototype we were able to put together in the last couple of days as well as its integration with AWS and Google Cloud.

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