iCompost

Let's learn to compost together!

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With more than half the team being from a city that supports composting, we wanted to create an education game that teaches users not only how to compost, but how to organize their garbage to help the environment. Even when the options of recycling and composting are available, many people do not realize the restrictions of what we can and cannot put in those blue and green bins. With iCompost, we teach people why we must wash our plastic before throwing them in the recycling, or why coffee cups cannot, in fact, be composted. We hope with iCompost, we can help continue the movement of organizing our garbage to help our environment and lead healthier lifestyles.

We started out with the idea of creating an educational game, and we began discussing how composting is provided in San Francisco, we realized how in college, many people do not know how to compost or sometimes recycle. After organizing our ideas for the game, we then decided to use Pygame to code the game itself in Python. All sprites and images of the types of trash and bins are hand drawn, and the game is downloadable from our website, icompost.tech, which we built with html and css.

Some challenges we faced was that we wanted to have our game to show directly on our website, but we discovered that Python and Pygame does not work on web browsers. So instead we created an executable that can be downloaded and run. We also ran into trouble when trying to host and deploy our website, but eventually we were able to connect it to heroku and domain.com.

Overall, our experience was extremely fun and helpful, and we learned much more than we could have imagined. We learned 3 languages, how to host and deploy a website, and how to create a game from scratch. We hope that users can have fun while playing our game and reading our website, and in the the future, we can continue improving iCompost to continue teaching more about how to help our environment.

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