Cal-Plantly

Interact with SLO's first virtual community garden

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Inspiration

Drawn to SLO's unique vegetation and beautiful scenic walks, we were inspired to create a game that would get users off their feet and learn more about the plant life Cal Poly has to offer.

What it does

This web-based community garden allows users to interact with garden plots set up around campus. Upon being within a certain radius of a plot, one can click on a marker and open up its respective garden. Each garden is populated with plants, which the user can water in order to keep healthy. If a plant doesn't get water for more than two days then it becomes unhealthy, so it is important to visit your gardens often and keep them rejuvenated!

Specific features:

  • The plant book in the top right allows the user to learn more about certain plants by clicking on plant names. (make sure to click on the Cal Plantly logo in order to navigate back to the main map!)
    • The icon in the top left represents the real-time weather of SLO county. When it rains, all the plants get watered and everyone is happy.
  • Create an account to log your progress

How we built it

We used React, Azure Maps, and Weather API for the front end and Node.js/Express.js for the back end.

Challenges we ran into

  • The Map API we used did not have a lot of documentation so we had to do a lot of experimentation to get it working with the garden markers
  • Figuring out how to get a user's location

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Finishing this project and getting it successfully hosted to a web link that everyone can access!

What we learned

  • how to host a website with a backend server
  • how to get a users location and have it continuously update on a map
  • the cool plant species around our school!

What's next for Cal-Plantly

  • Users can create their own plots and place flowers, which other users can visit and interact with
  • Avatar and marker customization
  • Adding more flower species and other ways to keep your plants healthy, such as fertilizer
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