Compost 4 Kids

Compost 4 Kids Landing Page! Here you can find out about our mission and why composting is important for food security.
Compost Kid Game - Click "Start" to Begin Composting!
Road becomes populated with different types of wastes (plastics, food scraps, etc.)
The Compost Kid (You) must drag the item to the correct waste bin.
Custom Made At-Home Activity Infographics for Students (third graphic populated from Canva).
Resources page that features a calendar with compost drop-off days at local sites in LA. Below are LGBTQ+ supportive food banks.

Inspiration

Research has found that more LGBT than non-LGBT people have experienced inadequate or uncertain access to food.

Compost can help reduce food insecurity by supporting the growth of local food in personal and community gardens. This allows for easier access to safe and nutritious foods for people.

In addition, composting is also good for the environment and is free!

SB1383, an up and coming compost legislation in 2024, will financially penalize residents for improper waste disposal.

Although SB1383 will help improve food security, without adequate outreach and stewardship of food waste, marginalized communities may be disproportionately vulnerable to fines.

Compost 4 Kids helps pipeline compost education to schools and the general public through local policy makers and thus promotes adequate outreach of food waste.

What it does

Compost4Kids is an free interactive web application that provides an educational game for users to teach where to properly dispose of waste (e.g. recycle, compost).

The game displays a character on a city road with different types of trash appearing that need to be put into the correct waste bin. This allows for users to be better prepared for SB 1383, a compost legislation being implemented in 2024.

This website also features a resource page with information on LA County Composting Site, At-Home Activities for Students, Sustainable Agriculture and Food Events, and LGBTQ+ Supportive Food Banks.

How we built it

For the webpage we used the Svelte framework. For our game we used the Pixi rendering engine, Piskel for drawing all the animations, Desmos for using derivatives to help emulate a 3D playing field, Pico styling library for UI, Canva for creating infographics.

For the resources page, we built custom made infographics for composting activities that students could do at home. We also built a calendar that displays information on composting drop off days and locations for February 2023.

Challenges we ran into

Turning a rendering engine into a game engine (had to reimplement the functionality of common game engines, memory leak errors, Pixi specific errors (getting sprites and animations to work).