BeeWise

BeeWise combats news bias with gamification! It curates diverse news sources, tracks reading habits, and rewards users for exploring all perspectives. Earn points, badges & compete with friends!

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BeeWise

1. Background

Due to the increasing influence of social media companies, news outlets have often become more focused on their ability to catch one’s attention with aggressive and unsupported claims. In doing so, they damage the validity of their claims, and many would argue that this is a necessary tradeoff to maintain an interest in the current news.

What if the excitement around news could be generated to promote an approach of diversifying one's viewpoints and looking at issues through a broader lens? We believe it can, and we have done so with our app, BeeWise. Using gamified news content, the user is rewarded by taking a more complete path to attaining their own thoughts and opinions on prominent news stories.

GitHub repository: https://github.com/25dlee/BeeWise

Briefly describe the motivation behind your project:

  • Disinformation in news sources
  • Need for a fun, engaging way to track reading habits and share learning
  • Growing interest in “eco-awareness,” “bee conservation,” or any relevant cause

2. What It Does

  • Crawls relevant news sources for current significant news topics
  • Provides articles from left-leaning, right-leaning, and central perspectives
  • Uses advanced AI to classify biases objectively within the articles
  • Tracks user reading activity and awards points for each article read, providing additional points to users who explore both sides of an issue
  • Showcases a point leaderboard with friends, motivating users through friendly competition
  • Displays user profile with earned badges for total points, total articles read, and completing missions

3. Tech Stack

Data

  • Goose3 to web scrape news articles from CNN, AP, and Fox News
  • Integrating with OpenAI’s Swarm framework for sentiment analysis, political leaning classification, and AI summary

Backend

  • AWS S3

Frontend

  • React with JavaScript, HTML, CSS

4. Challenges

One of our biggest challenges was deciding on a project that used gamified learning for social good. After discussing with one of the Code for Good mentors (shoutout Sahithi Meduri!), we decided on BeeWise – focusing on using gamification to increase information literacy and prevent echo chambers.

Another challenge was coming up with a tech stack, as we each came from different tech backgrounds:

  • Pierce - web scraping and scripting
  • Aidan - Java and game development
  • Dasol - Java and UI/UX design
  • Kelly - full-stack web development and UI/UX design

Other challenges in development

  • Implementing shared global state for user points and badges
  • Designing a clean, responsive UI in React
  • Ensuring data from S3/JSON endpoints loaded correctly
  • Handling authentication or user-specific data (if applicable)

5. Accomplishments

  • Smooth user experience and design
  • Efficient data fetching and rendering
  • Real-time point updates across Home, SocialPage, and UserProfilePage
  • Unique user badges (e.g., “Bee aware”) and dynamic leaderboards

6. Learning

  • Planning can take a long time, but it saves time in development
  • Sometimes work is done best with multiple people around the computer, if not just to have someone for sanity checks
  • Not knowing a piece of the tech stack doesn’t mean you can’t contribute to it
  • How to effectively delegate tasks
  • How to implement React Context for shared state
  • AI Agents work best when given extremely specific procedures and roles
  • Became more well-versed with managing Git workflow on a team

7. What’s Next for BeeWise

  • Adding more badges or achievements for diverse topics (e.g., environmental, social, economic)
  • Integrating more APIs for additional news sources or fact-checking
  • Implementing user authentication to store personal reading history across sessions
  • Deploying the project for public access (e.g., on Netlify, Heroku, or a custom domain)

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