Gaia | Devpost

Inspiration

Recently, a climate clock in New York City has caught everyone attention as it predicted that we only have 7 years and 102 days left to act before it's too late. With such state of our world right now, we believe that something needs to be done, to at least prolong our existence. Therefore, we tried to figure out the root of the problem and how everyone can play a significant part in combating the crisis together, and we ended up with the conclusion to solve it by offsetting daily carbon footprint consumption by individuals. However, this carbon footprint consumption is something that most people are not familiar with. So, we also think that having a mechanism to educate and assist individuals regarding that issue would be great.

What it does

Our app, Gaia, will help individuals calculating their carbon footprint consumption, offers a personalised recommendation on the "quick wins" action that they can do based on their inputs, and offer a donate feature for them that will be used to fund environmental and conservation acts. With this, users will be fully aware of their significant involvement in this issue and have the chance to act straight away to offset the negative externalities that they have caused.

How we built it

Create an initial mockup with Figma to align our thoughts on the design and functionalities. Then build the front-end with Swift and SwiftUI, and the back-end with the H2 database engine and REST API in Java using Spring Boot. For the back-end, we also calculated the carbon footprint estimation with the data and formula that we could find.

Challenges we ran into (yet we have resolved)

Xcode’s compiler and code completion keep dying, aligning our thoughts on the project.
Request errors
Definitely time, therefore, we need to prioritise the functionalities that we want to show, as well as the task distribution.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Successfully built the prototype for the app (at least on our main functionality) and the pitch video, and of course, overcome time zone differences.

What we learned

Effective teamwork skills, being trustworthy and responsible to the team (especially in a virtual hackathon where most people just leave in the middle of the hacks), and deeper understanding on the environmental aspects, especially related to carbon footprint consumption. Some of our team members also learned new tech stacks during the hacks.

What's next for Gaia

Add bigger storage on the back end and add more variables to calculate, add a machine learning algorithm to improve personalised recommendation, and add more languages to increase the accessibility of Gaia as this issue is a global issue and everyone need to work hand in hand together.