Beans for Good

Coffee beans, green beans, soy beans. Beans are the lifeblood and soul food for countless communities around the world. We want to bring the power of beans to our local community. Beans for Good is an online platform that allows people to help their local communities in a gamified environment from their very own homes, connecting in need facilities and organisations to stores and willing donors using the power of the player's beans!

Inspiration

Beans for Good was inspired by the want to create a humanitarian solution that incentivises individuals that may otherwise be apprehensive to contribute to their local community. When thinking of a solution, we combined our passion for virtual worlds with an idea to bring suppliers and those in need together with the final piece of the puzzle being you.

What it does

Players navigate the virtual world of Beans for Good, a digital representation of their local community. Local stores can setup storefronts in which players can use the in game currency of beans to purchase goods that are needed around their community. Organisations can setup centres where players can then donate their goods. Behind the scenes, the player has just organised a transaction that connects a willing supplier and an organisation in need, helped along with the donation of their own funds!

How we built it

Beans for Good is built on top of the HTML5 game framework Phaser. Phaser is used to render the virtual world and allow players to move and interact within it. React has been used on top of Phaser to allow the creation of functional UI elements that enrich the interaction with the in-game world. Behind the scenes is a Node.js backend connected to a MongoDB database to facilitate the creation of storefronts and the storing of individual users' funds and goods.

Challenges we ran into

This was our first time using Phaser in a project, and connecting that with React was a challenge that we were not expecting to be able to persevere through. On top of this, it was also our first time using a Node backend and a NoSQL database. Overall, we leveraged technologies that we were mostly unfamiliar with, which was a challenge given the tight deadline!

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Looking back on the project, we are proud of all the new skills and technologies that we otherwise would not have learned had we not competed in Codebrew 2024. It has been incredibly satisfying for all of us to see our development and collaboration skills grow at an incredible pace over the past few days.

What's next for Beans for Good

There is still much more to build for Beans for Good. First of all, a portal to allow stores to create customisable storefronts and for organisations to request certain items, all without diving into a single line of code. Beyond this, we would love Beans for Good to be customised for every local community to reflect the positive impact every bean makes.