CityGenic

Skip to 2:42 for app demo

✨ Inspiration ✨

As high schoolers, we are aware of how challenging it may be to volunteer. There are frequently not enough open opportunities, and the ones we do locate frequently don't match our hectic schedules' time needs. And as the end of grade 12 draws near, we find ourselves rushing to finish those hours. Additionally, volunteering at charities, religious institutions, and food banks is wonderful for our communities, but there are few chances in what is perhaps the most significant area of life—OUR EARTH.

🔍 What it does

We are pleased to introduce CityGenic, a mobile application that enables kids, teens, and even adults to identify and publish chances to clean our surroundings. It is available for android and, maybe, ios in the future. Our software enables users to identify places that require cleaning and sign up for a certain time to pick up trash and debris in towns, parks, beaches, and other recreational areas. These hours are recorded and count toward a person's volunteer hours which they can send through our app to their school if they choose to do so.

🚧 Challenges we ran into

Managing the way the data is stored on Firebase to reduce load times (Used sub-collections)
Making sure the client side is intuitive to use so that the user can get their volunteer hours easily

🥇 Accomplishments that we're proud of 🥇

We are proud of the idea we had; took a lot of work to think outside the box
Successfully getting the functionality to work within a sprint hackathon

📚 What we learned

We learned a bunch of new things about kotlin
We also tried our best to learn how to come up with original designs for our app

😲 What's next for City Genic 😲

Firstly we plan to make significant changes to the user interface and design of our app. Since we made this over the course of very few days we wanted to focus on showing the functionality rather than just having a good-looking app. As well, one of our largest goals is to expand to potential non-student demographics. The more users we have the cleaner our cities and ecosystems will be which is why we want to get as many involved as possible. However, we had to be realistic with ourselves and knew if we wanted to reach demographics beyond the scope of just teens in high school looking for hours we needed to reward them in a more monetary aspect. We accomplished this by adding a reward system where depending on how long you work you can get discounts and coupons from your favorite stores using our app. We plan to support this by using a similar strategy discussed in marketing which was to add areas that need cleaning near stores and have them add their own coupons and discounts to our app that they can scan at store checkouts. We were halfway through implementing this however we had some difficulty connecting it to our front-end which is why we decided to publish this feature in the near future.

Slide Deck Link At The Bottom