Turtle Earth

How can we encourage people who live in these communities near the sea to switch to more wildlife friendly and energy efficient bulbs? The answer? Turtle Earth!

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Inspiration

We've learned a lot about protecting the environment at school and also about measures we should be taking to protect the world we live in. During the Finastra takeover day at our school when we were learning about Finance in FinED an idea came across our minds. Why not use finance as a way to help people work together to protect the environment.

We knew this was a big goal, and we needed to start somewhere small but that could make a huge impact. So we chose Turtles. Every year millions of baby turtles die on the beaches each year due to light pollution luring them away from the ocean and towards built up areas. This light pollution also harms other wildlife, not to mention it's wasteful using all that electricity to make extra light we don't need.

What it does

Turtle Earth works by offering green loans from the bank to communities near the sea. Why is this different to a normal loan? Thanks to Finastra's Trust Machine we will have access to give people loans as individuals or as groups. So for settlements without a lot of money they can borrow together to get as many bulbs as possible and help everyone save money, the environment and the turtles.

When we arrange a loan through our app we take a small commission from the bank for setting up that loan and any savings on electricity that the customer makes go towards the repayment of the loan. Once the loan is paid off the customer gets to keep all savings from the use of less energy.

We also offer people to buy our bulbs outright, so they can start saving energy and the environment straight away! Bulbs bought outright don't pass on savings to the bank, instead the customer gets to keep the money they saved!

How we built it

We worked with our mentor to build this idea. We started by drawing screen designs of what we wanted the screens to look like. We knew we wanted to use our school colours and logo and our mentor helped us create those screens. He taught us a lot about CSS, JavaScript and HTML and how these can be used to make Websites, Apps and other things. We used CSS, HTML and JavaScript with our mentor to help make the real app you see on this page.

Challenges we ran into

It wasn't easy! We learned a lot about finance and green loans which really helped us to figure out what we wanted to do and where we wanted to sell it. Some of the topics in this hackathon were really complex and our mentor helped us to understand it but we would love to learn more! The code was hard. We have done hour of code and scratch before but seeing what we were using to make the app was really hard to understand at first.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • We're proud of our design for the app and how we managed to make that into a real app.
  • We’re proud that we got to work together as a team to represent our school.
  • We’re proud that we came up with this idea and figured out how to make it work. ## What we learned
  • Teamwork and how to share ideas and agree on what to do with all of our ideas
  • We learned about seafront communities and the problems turtles have with these.
  • We learned a bit about code, we saw some HTML, JavaScript, CSS and learned about how Apps and Websites are made.
  • We learned a lot about Finance. We were taught about green loans and how banks and other lenders are trying to help make it easier to borrow money to do good things.
  • We learned about how borrowing money works.

What's next for Turtle Earth

The idea is great, but it can’t stand on it’s own. To make the idea viable we will need:

  • Take the prototype app and turn it into a real app.
  • We will need to advertise.
  • Improve awareness partnering with Roblox and CCell
  • Banks to use Finastra API’s and S-BOB to make group loans work.

Finally we will need to plug our app into Finastra API’s from these products to handle the money:

  • Trust Machine / FusionTrust
  • Fusion Essence / Other lending platforms
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