SimpliReduce

A mobile app that encourages communities to reduce their carbon emission by biking, walking, or carpooling more often and setting a monthly goal of how much carbon they want to avoid emitting.

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Inspiration

In my neighborhood, I have seen more people biking, walking, and carpooling to places because of rise in gas prices. After hearing about the theme, I though about how if there were more people that avoided driving alone we could reduce carbon emission by a lot and help reduce the impact of global warming. I did some research to learn more. I discovered that citizens carpooling on the way to or from work or school can decrease 22%-28% CO2 emissions, and that approximately 5 thousand metric tones of carbon dioxide could be saved annually if more people commuted by biking or walking.

What it does

The app helps communities reduce their carbon emissions by having them set a monthly goal how many pounds of C02 they want to avoid emitting. The three main tabs are carpool, log, and public chat. The carpool tab allows them to create requests to carpool with others to a specified location at a defined time. The log tab is how the neighborhood tracks its progress toward its monthly goal. Every time a community member bikes, walks, or carpools to a location they usually would have driven alone to, they will log in their miles to help contribute to the community total. Finally, a built in chat feature allows community members to talk to each other and share their accomplishments.

How I built it

I built it using react native on a platform called expo. The editor I used was visual studios and I tested the app with ExpoGo.

Challenges I ran into

I had a very hard time finding a way to store my data for user login, chat logs, emmisions saved, ect. I tried using firebase's firestore database but it was really slow and threw a lot of errors. After trying other methods like locked json and txt files, I settled on using the react native async storage api.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I am very proud of myself for being able to complete the project on time because it was a big undertaking for me.

What I learned

I learned a lot about react native and expo as I had not using either before. I will definitely use them in future mobile development projects.

What's next for SimpliReduce

In the future, I hope to expand this by adding more moderation, more community inclusion with features like a monthly leaderboard, making a version that is more elderly friendly, have a private chat tab, and making watchOS and android/apple widget integrations to make logging miles even easier.

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