Green Goose

Green Goose thumbnail
Map feature
Garden area
Statistics
Leaderboard

Inspiration

While walking around University of Waterloo and touring nearby garbage cans, we realized a vital issue. Most people don't dispose items properly! We discovered the root issues of these problems: lack of incentives, lack of motivation, and lack of education.

So, we combined all these elements into one to create a gamified web app (soon to be app)! Our hope is to help increase proper waste disposal at UW from 28.2% to 66%.

What it does

Green Goose is a website (that will be converted to an app!) that displays the location of nearby garbage cans, where users can walk around the University of Waterloo campus, and dispose items from the marker locations.

When you're nearby a trash can, it will enable the user to click on the garbage can marker (signifying they disposed). We have a point system, where each time an item is disposed properly, the user will gain points.

These points can be used to trade to play our garden game, and can be displayed in the leaderboard if you're in the top 5. For future features, we hope to create a currency system, where points can be exchanged for monetary awards!

With these features, our goal is to not just improve waste environmentally, but also build a sustainable and loving community at the University of Waterloo.

How we built it

We build Green Goose using Javascript, Google Maps API, HTML, and CSS.

For me (Jasmine), this was one of my first times experimenting with Javascript and Google Maps API, so it was quite difficult!

Challenges we ran into

Using the Google Maps API was a big challenge as we had little experience with it. It was a big learning curve that we only barely got over with the help of a mentor. This was also the first hackathon for half of our members and it was overwhelming to try and finish the project, the pitch, and the presentation all in one day.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are very proud of the points system that we created that allows users to quickly click which trash they have disposed garbage in (huge shoutout to Jasmine :D). It is very simple to do but plays a very crucial part of our app that all our features heavily rely on. Becoming more familiar with the abilities of Google Maps API was an amazing learning journey.

What we learned

While we had one member who had experience with building websites, it was a new learning experience for everyone else. Some of us had to learn HTML, CSS, Javascript all in a few hours while the rest had to learn about web designing. Both proved to be hurdles that everyone luckily cleared.

What's next for Green Goose

In the future we'd love for Green Goose to be an app instead of a website. This could improve the engagement between users and our project so that the community is more active altogether. Things like widgets could help quickly remind users to make sure to say they threw trash in the correct place, as typing out an entire website might take too long. Implementing something like a 'streak' keeper could also encourage users to login daliy!