HackDuke CodeForGood2020

Authors

Arpita Das, Sagnik Nayak, Tejas Pruthi, Simran Sidhu

Inspiration

We realized that although many of us want to help the environment and reduce our carbon footprint, we are unaware of how much an individual can do to help. With this webapp, users will be able to set and track their sustainability goals to contribute to the fight against the climate crisis. Our team realized that we all work best as a community, which is why we implemented adding friends in EcoBuddy. With support and friendly competition, users can compete with their friends to see who can progress the most on their sustainability goals.

What it does

Once signed into our webapp, a user will see a dashboard composing of a list of their selected sustainability goals, their personal progress bar, and their friends. They can add or remove goals from a global list of sustainable goals once logged it. Each goal is assigned a number of points based off of the environmental impact of the goal. These points are used to calculate a user's progress. A user can join circles with their friends and compete with them. This will encourage people to compete to complete more goals; hence live a more healthy and sustainable life. A user can also see the points that their friends accumulate.

How I built it

We built this webapp using ReactJS, Node, and Firebase. We used React for front end design and user interface. We used Firebase for our database. We also used Firebase for user authentication.

Challenges I ran into

Initially we wanted EcoBuddy to be a mobile app, but given the time and experience constraints we decided to develop a webapp instead. Additionally, this was our first time using Firebase so we ran into a few problems with user authentication and password verfication. Given the time constraints, we had to cut out a few functionalities that we thought would add some more fun to the project. Hopefully we can continue working on the project to provide these features in the future.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

In addition to implementing and understanding Firebase, working on a project that focused on fighting the climate crisis was very fun and fulfilling. We had a lot of fun working on a product that we would use.

What I learned

Throughout developing this app, we learned a ton about React, Firebase, and sustainability practices. Working with Firebase really highlighted the importance of data management, especially when it comes to formatting data across multiple users.

What's next for EcoBuddy

The next step for EcoBuddy is refining of current features and the addition of more features that will improve the user experience and social aspects of the app. Our biggest goal would be to convert the web app into an actual mobile application. This would allow the users to take EcoBuddy with them wherever they go. We also want to improve social features by adding circles. This will allow users to create small groups of 6 friends with whom they can compete with in daily challenges. Circles will add to engagement, and friendly competition amongst users.