WORLDVIEW

I entered Great Uni Hack 2019 with 3 coursemates from university, and we chose to tackle the AstraZeneca challenge on sustainability. From the three words ‘Mobile’, ‘Gamification’, and ‘Recycling’, we designed a self reflective tool to visualise your recycling habits by showing their impact on a virtual city.

By logging how much you had recycled from certain categories, the city grew and changed. Better paper recycling would grow trees, reducing food waste would grow farms, other recycling would replace factories with parks, and the large skyscrapers at the top of the city indicated your overall progress with all three categories.

This was my first 24 hour hackathon, and it was an amazing, albeit tiring experience! I managed to get 5 hours of sleep during the hackathon, and I don’t think I would have coped without it.

We had some issues at first trying to build the app in Android Studio, which led me to suggest we use Unity instead, despite our project only being vaguely gamified. I was the only one with Unity experience, so in the hours that followed my teammates started getting to grips with Unity whilst I worked on the graphics. We split the project into several features, then assigned these to different members. The last few hours were spent integrating these separate features into one main project.

Though we didn’t have time to add everything we’d originally planned (I had hoped to put animated animals in the empty space of the farms), we’re still very happy with how our project turned out. We didn’t win the AstraZeneca challenge but we did win the ‘beginners prize’ for being the team that had learnt the most!