Our work is in the field of sustainability. We know that people are getting aware of issues of global warming, recycling, carbon footprint. But people lack the incentives to do something about it on a personal level. That is where our website/app name steps in Verdant is a platform where people can complete sustainability tasks to earn achievements. This gives the users a target to achieve something and also helps the world become a better place.
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 similarly and be able to work jointly with friends.
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 it: 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 user to care for this animal while also getting them to become more "green". Finally, a collaborative mode also exists, allowing friends to merge their biomes and take on challenges together to ensure the well-being of both of their animals simultaneously.
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.
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 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.
One main accomplishment that we could all be proud of, other than the technical skills we all learned, as having participated in our first hackathon.
We were each able to learn at least one new skill over the last hours: one of us was able to learn 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).
We have to make an actual app. We have to figure out how to pay out our users. We have to integrate the services of google cloud and AWS for storing information. In the future, we can provide people with an analysis of their net carbon footprint of the day. Input will be taken from the user.