What the Next Generation Can Bring to Climate Change – 2nd Place Climathon Results

I recently had the pleasure to be involved in a “Climathon”, a Climate Change related Hackathon as a judge.  It was coordinated by What The Hack.co and it was all run completely remotely through Discord.  Impressively, the teams only had one month to be put together and get creative. They also had mentors throughout that month who gave up their time willingly and supported each team.

The judges were massively impressed with each of the teams contributions but there could only be one winner.  Which frankly was really hard to do, so we ended up with a very close second!

The creativity, audacity and teamwork for both teams stood out.  I’m sure you’ll be equally impressed.  In this blog post we hear from the very close Runners Up:

How did you get involved with the Hackathon in the first place?

As the NUIG Energy Society, we hear from 2-3 guest speakers each semester, and last semester, the Sustainability Officer on campus, Michelle O’Dowd, gave us a head’s up that a Climathon-style event was going to be rolled out in February. Keeping our eyes and ears peeled, we saw Lorraine Tansey publish some information about the Climathon in early February. We were super interested in the concept and the seven of us formed an “Energy Society” team.

What possible solutions did you consider before going ahead with this one?

Two other major solutions we discussed were a water bottle filling station map, easily accessible to all NUIG students and perhaps shared electronically with them at orientation, so students would know where they could refill their bottles on campus. This idea arose from learning that many students did not know where they could fill their reusable bottles, and therefore made buying plastic bottles more of a necessity. With this idea, we hoped to minimize the reliance on single use plastics on campus and facilitate students’ ability to use reusable water bottles.

The second idea we had was to address a major issue on campus in concerns to sustainable practices, which is the high levels of waste, much of which is disposed of improperly. We considered apps, barcodes, and reward systems in addition to greater education and informational signage to help reduce waste and incorrectly disposed of waste.

What project did you end up going with and why do you feel its needed now?

In the end, we decided to develop an app that works as a “12-step program,” of sorts, to help people transition from our “average” lifestyles to more sustainable ones with baby steps that make it easy to do so (“Couch to 5k” style). We also incorporated a CO2 emissions tracker component that adds a positive feedback, or goal-based, incentive so users can see how much of a difference each change they make has. The app, called EcoTracker, contains 8 themes in which users can choose to enhance their sustainability, for instance water use, energy use, sustainable shopping, and diet. Within each theme are a series of challenges, or tasks, ranging from read a few infographics to gain context for what this theme has to do with your personal CO2 emissions and climate change, to watch this short educational video, to try to incorporate these more sustainable habits into your daily lifestyle! The user’s reduction in personal CO2 emissions are calculated along the way and converted into more understandable equivalencies, such as CO2 emitted by cars driving so far a distance or amount of CO2 sequestered from so many trees growing for 10 years. With each action along the path to living more sustainably, it is clear that each individual can make a significant difference. Once a user completes one theme, (s)he may continue on to another, compare how (s)he is doing against friends or classmates, and learn more at our additional resources page.

We decided to pursue this solution because we felt, and then supported with polling data, that students have a desire to live more sustainably that was further fueled by the fact they are feeling increasingly overwhelmed about the climate crisis, but many have difficulty knowing where to start or finding feasible ways to make the switch to more sustainable practices. Our goal is to provide easy, affordable, and realistic changes that can be made and to show the very real impact making them has on our personal carbon footprint. We aspire to make living more sustainably fun, something that can be incorporated into the classroom, and something that people are not excluded from on grounds of price or personal circumstance.

Please share your pitch!

Please find Demo pitch and Pitch attached

What areas of expertise did your team mates bring to the table?

Hannah Aris – App and challenge development, liaison with external groups, Demo pitch orator Sinead Leahy – Demo pitch development and background research

Orla McAllister – Pitch development, previous experience in promoting initiatives to sustainability bodies

Dylan Moore – App development and background research

Aoife Roche – Demo pitch development and background research

Niamh Killeen – Lead on poll development and understanding public opinion, pitch development Bogdan Baturov – Pitch development and Pitch orator

You had a mentor throughout the challenge, tell us who you had and what they could bring to the project?

Our mentor provided us with valuable insight into the types of groups we could reach out to to determine if there was interest in our solution (the app). This got us thinking about reaching out to Green Schools and the Sustainability on Campus officer, who were both very enthusiastic and supportive of the idea, further encouraging us to move ahead with it and make it as valuable a resource as we could. Our mentor also provided us with reassurance and support, which helped keep us positive about the project.

How did you manage to keep in contact with everyone throughout? Did it pose a challenge?

Fortunately, we have gotten to know one another fairly well previously through Energy Society. Our society is split into 6 sub-committees and we operate frequently through Microsoft Teams. Due to the interest in participating in the Climathon, we generated an additional group devoted to this project. We were able to communicate quickly via WhatsApp and store our research, ideas, and planning documents in Microsoft Teams, where we also met weekly. At times it was difficult to communicate as one or two members inevitably would have another meeting they had to run off to, so for the first few weeks of idea development it was challenging to ensure everyone was on the same page. As the date drew nearer, however, we were able to focus in on exactly how we wanted our solution to manifest itself and what extra work still needed to be done.

What problems did you overcome and how?

We originally had some difficulties in understanding the software we were building our demo in. Fortunately, our dedicated team was able to figure it out by working hard and together to develop our final app demo. We also had some difficulties, principally, of supporting our general idea of how students feel with data, but after we developed our poll, we were able to get substantial support for the need of our EcoTracker app (160 people were polled in total). Finally, we were unsure if there would be an appetite for our app in the classroom, both at the university and secondary school level, which was how we envisioned getting high numbers of users on to our app. Fortunately, after reaching out to Sustainability on Campus and Green Schools, we were reassured that our idea was something that would likely be welcomed by classrooms as a way to incorporate sustainability into teaching (a goal in most educational systems).

Well done for getting second place! How would you like to proceed now with the project? How are you going to push it to fruition?

Our principal goal is to put time and effort into developing the actual app in full, and to get some trial users so we can get feedback on how to make it better. We would also love to get more groups on board for utilizing our app by spreading the word more. If there really is a space for the app within classrooms and lecture theatres across the country, we want to ensure that instructors know about the resource, and we can get as many students using the app as possible. Changing our habits is not easy, but our goal is to make it as fun as possible through friendly competition with peers and gratification of seeing the difference that one person alone can make by choosing to live more sustainably.