Daily Footprint

SMS
User Database
Message Database

Inspiration

We took a quiz back in elementary school about our ecological footprint in a general sense. However, since it was a quiz we took once it was easy to forget and neglect our results. Thus, we believe with Daily Footprint would keep its users more environmentally conscious on a regular basis.

What it does

The main component of our website is the daily quiz used to evaluate the user's daily ecological footprint. By answering questions, users can earn points that will be added to their accounts. Based on those results, the website will generate personally tailored activities for the user to attempt to improve your efforts in helping the environment. Activities would be sent to the user via SMS messaging. The coins earned from the quiz can be used in the plant section where the user may purchase items to help nurture their plant. The interactive plant game gives the users an incentive to do the quiz every day and stay aware of the activities that are harmful to the environment. The Stores page allows users to enter their area code to filter out and find stores near them that source their products from eco-friendly providers. To personalize the experience, the user can sign up and have their data saved into a database. In addition, we incorporated an admin page that assigns more admins and each admin is allowed to input more messages which will be placed into another database.

How we built it

We implemented the Twilio API to facilitate our SMS messaging for activities and the Wakefern API to pull from a database of stores. A majority of our pages are powered by general php and javascript coding. XAMPP was used to host our databases of accounts, coins, and activities. In order to make the quiz, we used JavaScript to track players' answers and calculate total points. When the quiz is submitted, these points are added to the main MySQL database using PHP. The database allows the points to be saved and accessed on the Plant page, where coins can be redeemed for water and fertilizer for your plant.

Challenges we ran into

One of the main issues was connecting to a server to access databases. From the start, we had trouble figuring out how to share one server and even later on we struggled to save values into our databases. In the end, we had the server running on one laptop which we shared. There were also problems with formatting the layout which we tediously changed until it fit our liking.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

It seemed daunting at first, but we were proud that we were able to figure out how to implement the APIs and learn languages that we were beginners at or had no knowledge of. Even though the time was short, we surprised ourselves that we were able to make fully-functioning pages.

What we learned

Overall, our team got a better understanding of Javascript, php, and databases. It was also some of our first times using an API.

What's next for Daily Footprint

In the future, we hope to include more pages that suggest ways on how to be more environmentally conscious such as suggesting meals to eat, showing local environment-improvement events, and providing a progress chart. We hope to expand the variety and functionality of the plant shop as well. If possible, the store would hold more information about the impact and reviews of the stores.