Inspiration
Our team saw that the most important resource in our world, time, was going unused every day. For us, it was similar to throwing away tons and tons of food per person every hour, minute, and day of our lives. That's why we created an application that asks people simply for their time and allows them to benefit businesses, governments, and themselves.
What it does
While allows normal people to help businesses and governments by using a couple minutes of time each day. The two features that are part of While are the AI Training Set feature and the Recyclable Material Distribution feature. In the AI Training Set feature, members of the community (who have signed up) are asked to answer a few questions defined by companies who are looking to improve or make their AI. These questions can range from multiple choice, a video response, audio response or a written response. These questions are likely to be things that are difficult to simply make up as data, such as written emails or even common questions about our world. For example, there has recently been a strong push to integrate knowledge about our world and how it works into AI, which is where this app could come in handy. All the responses from hundreds of people (or however many the company requires) are then merged together on one page.
The second feature that we built includes a few tangible components. We realized that in our normal lives, most people simply dump recyclable items into the recycling bin. These items then get taken to a recycling facility where they are reproduced as raw materials which are then sold back to the businesses who made the materials in the first place. We found that interesting since an additional entity was added in between individuals' homes that have the recyclable items and the actual end businesses that use the raw material. We thought: What if these recyclable items went straight from peoples' homes to businesses. Of course, this wouldn't happen in such a massive way like recycling, but could definitely reduce costs for the businesses using these raw materials. For instance, one of our relatives is the Director of Operations at a foam plate facility. He told us that the raw material from recycling facilities took time to 'bake' and then turn into foam, which would be ready for moulding into plates. Thus, we realized that if we simply took peoples' foam plates (not too damaged or dirty) and gave it back to the businesses that made similar items, they could reduce operating costs by a fair amount each month. These businesses would then pay the individuals supplying these plates with a fraction of the cost that they pay to recycle facilities. Again, this would not entirely fill up the raw material requirement for businesses but would somewhat help reduce costs especially for operation-heavy items. Thus, our individuals and local businesses with recyclable items can give them to manufacturers that make similar items and get paid each month while simply going about their only tasks.
How I built it
Our team built While using classic web development languages such as HTML, CSS, JS and we used Cloud Firestore and Firebase Authentication for our database and authentication requirements. We also made use of a wireframing and prototyping application called Figma to plan out our screens.
Challenges I ran into
Our team had many challenges along the way, in the start, we were contemplating between ideas. We also had some inexperienced developers which made the process a little bit harder because they weren't used to the pressure and the complexity of the code. The last problem we had was that the scale of the project demotivated us we looked at the project as one big website rather than seeing it as a giant project with different parts. These challenges made our team much stronger and also showed us how to work under pressure.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
My team and I are really proud of the fact that we were able to finish the whole project in 24 hours even though we had some unexperienced coders on our team and a very code-heavy application.
What I learned
We learned how to work under pressure and manage our time effectively. Most importantly, we understood more about the Agile Methodology, which suggests that teams break up a large task into smaller sections to divide and conquer. This helped us quite a bit and increased motivation for our team.
What's next for While
While will be a full-on website that will start helping corporations like Microsoft, Apple, and large tech companies get data that will help improve their products. While will also start to recycle products like old tech parts such as phones which would save companies like Apple thousands of dollars as well as time. In addition to this, we also plan to add more features to while such a Computing Power section, where members of our community give their computers' computing power while it is not being used to solve other businesses' processing-heavy problems and serve as Server Insurance to re-route a business's hosting and server requirements if their servers ever go down. Later on, we also want to add a transportation feature that allows people to drop off packages, do errands, and map out cities for Google Maps and Waze while on their commutes or simply travelling. The future is definitely bright for While!
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