EcoFriend

The Project

For my coolest project, I created EcoFriend. EcoFriend is designed to be a web app for anyone who wants to help and learn about the environment in a game-like way. It covers points like climate change, air pollution, deforestation, and so much more. Taking care of the environment can be a tedious task, and sometimes, people wonder, What’s in it for us? Why should we do anything? The truth is, EVERYONE affects the world, however small that effect may be. So, I designed EcoFriend to be something fun and interesting, like a game, but also VERY educational. As a user, you start at Level One with 0 points. There are monthly missions; if you complete those, you have to send us an email with a picture of yourself doing the mission to get 20 points. You also have the opportunity to take a monthly quiz; If you get more than a 70% on it, you get 20 points. You even have the ability to read articles and watch videos on serious matters, in addition to viewing a few tips that update per month. Slowly, but surely, you gain points, until you reach Level 10 and earn a certificate. I wanted people to understand that protecting nature isn’t something you can do within a week or within a month. It takes years, if not even more, hence the concept of monthly missions, monthly quizzes, and monthly tips. With EcoFriend, you can even select a city and view its Particulate matter (PM2.5) pollution level, water quality, and climate change evidence. Attached to each of these sections is either a chart, report, or other website that serves as evidence to the data. So, although EcoFriend may have all these features, it’s purpose remains the same: to educate anyone and everyone about taking care of the environment around us because in the end, we always have turn to Mother Nature for our daily survival.

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Team Comments

My biggest source of inspiration to create this app was just watching the people around me. Very often I see people throwing things wherever they want to: on the sidewalk, in beaches and rivers, in the grass, and basically wherever they can. Barely anyone thinks twice before tossing something in the

I faced many, many technical difficulties while creating EcoFriend. The biggest one was just getting my code to work! I used Flask-SQLAlchemy for this project, which meant being able to create and use databases—a skill I had only had practice with one or two times. The main reason that was so hard

If I was going to create a version 2.0 of my app, I would definitely make a lot of improvements. First, I would improve the basic things, like adding more cities to my “View Stats” page (using an API that would get the country the user was from and output the results) or making quizzes harder based