Team SUS-GAWKY Earns 2nd Place in the 2022 Meteor Hackathon!

Team SUS-GAWKY took the silver medal in the 2022 Meteor Hackathon. Hear how these 5 university students plan to create impact via their app CarbonZero now:

Early morning classes, late-night cramming sessions, and unexpected shenanigans typify the average university experience.

But taking second place in a global hackathon?

That’s an experience very few can claim, and the five students from Team SUS-GAWKY are now in that elite circle.

These friends from the University of Hawaii at Mānoa blew us away with their app during the 2022 Meteor Hackathon. So we’re super excited to share what they’ve accomplished in this spotlight.

Creating Impact: the 2022 Meteor Hackathon Theme + Mission

For this year’s Hackathon, we challenged teams of no more than five to develop an impactful application using our Meteor Framework.

There were no restrictions on which field of interest teams could pick. They could build a product with a clear revenue stream, a non-profit, open-source, or anything in between. The only rule was that the app should be usable and deployed on Galaxy at the end.

The 2022 Meteor Hackathon ran from September 23 to September 30, with developers building, learning, and competing to win awesome prizes from around the world.

All participants received a certificate of participation and Galaxy credits ($100 value per team). But the top three winners would earn a cash prize, Meteor swag, one-on-one calls with the Meteor Core team, and more.

To decide the Hackathon winners, we judged ideas by a few guidelines:

• Impact. How impactful is the idea for a cause, as a business model, for a non-profit, etc.?
• Helpfulness. How will this app benefit or assist someone or something?
• Usability. The app must be realistic, easily usable, and deployed by the end of the Hackathon.

Everything needed to be developed during the Hackathon — no small feat for the busy university students on Team SUS-GAWKY.

Say Aloha to Team SUS-GAWKY 👋

SUS-GAWKY stands for (Sus)tainability and the first initials of everyone on the team:

• Gavin Peng, a web developer and software developer intern (portfolio).
• Alyssia Chen, an NSF-funded undergraduate research assistant at the LAVA Lab (Laboratory for Advanced Visualization & Applications) (portfolio).
• William Liang, an aspiring software engineer with a background in web apps and software development (portfolio).
• Kobey Arai, an IT digital experience and software development engineer intern (portfolio).
• Yong-Sung Masuda, a student interested in software engineering, ultimate frisbee, and chess (portfolio).

Gavin, Alyssia, William, Kobey, and Yong-Sung are all students in the Department of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa. They combined their powers to enter the Meteor Hackathon. And we’re so glad they did!

The CarbonZero App: How It Works + Why We Dig It

As the SUS-GAWKY team explains in their idea pitch video, sustainability is an issue we all encounter daily.

“We’re simply using resources faster than our Mother Earth can regenerate. And it’s a hassle for citizens to conserve these precious assets in a meaningful way.”

Their idea? To create a gamified app that allows users to track their habits while utilizing theories of social comparison to promote and maintain action.

SUS-GAWKY named their app CarbonZero. And you can see their app’s Gawkysaur mascot swimming in the waters of their landing page.

So how does it work?

Users Create an Account To Log their Consumption Habits & Generate a Personal Sustainability Score

More people are wearing devices to track their daily steps or using digital food journals to clock what they eat. Team SUS-GAWKY translated this concept to sustainability.

Users create an account in the CarbonZero app to easily log their consumption habits and monitor their carbon footprint. This dashboard provides users with easy access to challenges, check-in forms, and other app features.

The app uses a special algorithm to generate a score based on each user’s logs and other sustainability measures, which will be registered to their profile. In the bottom left, users will find a Unity scene that dynamically changes based on their sustainability score to illustrate how one’s actions can affect the world in the future. Poorer scores lead to a scene that is more grim whereas better scores display a more optimistic future.

Since each user’s sustainability score is based on their lifestyle and consumption, users can adapt and evolve their everyday choices to form better habits and raise their score. Similarly, they can see how choices negatively affect their sustainability score. Team SUS-GAWKY believes this will help users visualize the impact of their current decisions now and in the future.

People can also see other user rankings in the top right and learn how they compare. Additionally, there’s an emoji in the top right based on how well the user is doing. Team SUS-GAWKY said they read research about “how a face can prompt action,” so they put that intel to work.

Connect With Others and Compare Neighborhood Sustainability Scores

It’s far too easy to feel discouraged by our planet’s mounting environmental woes. Even the staunchest environmentalists occasionally doubt whether their actions really matter in the long run.

The CarbonZero app tackles this with the neighborhood screen. Rather than feeling isolated, or as if their individual impact doesn’t matter, users can see their impact and those made by others in their area.

Team SUS-GAWKY hopes their app becomes a place where users can create, participate, and share goals and tips related to sustainability.

To give users a more global sense, SUS-GAWKY also implemented a map where each neighborhood’s aggregate score is displayed. It’s visually color-coded, so greener scores are better. For the Hackathon, the team highlighted this capability on the island of Oahu (where they live).

This map proves individual actions can compound into more significant environmental impacts. Seeing these scores highlights the efforts made by a community and connects everyone to the same goal.

Tapping Into the Power of Gamification and Psychology

Gamification has been the biggest buzzword in tech for the last few years. Elements borrowed from gaming, such as point-scoring and a local leaderboard, encourage more app interactions, engagement, and friendly competition.

To prompt collaborative action, SUS-GAWKY created a “Challenge Page” where people can create challenges for other users to do with them.

Team SUS-GAWKY says it can be difficult to find the motivation to track one’s sustainability and carbon footprint. But with their app, improving one’s sustainability score offers users the chance to win prizes like NFTs.

Users who check in or complete challenges acquire points to spend in their store. They believed adding a gamification aspect would motivate people to use CarbonZero more and become more sustainable.

Ultimately, the real winner is our Mother Earth. But each user’s profile will display the prizes they’ve earned on their journey toward sustainability and a more eco-friendly way of living:

CarbonZero makes it seamless to track how well users are doing compared to their peers. It builds on the principles of social norms and social comparison. Psychology-based research shows there are six motives behind social comparison [*]:

1. Self-evaluation
2. Common bond
3. Self-improvement
4. Self-enhancement
5. Altruism
6. Self-destruction

CarbonZero hits on several of those motives, from evaluating and cultivating users’ sustainability scores to forming bonds with those in their neighborhood. The app is all about helping people be more conscious of their sustainability habits and encouraging everyone to live more sustainable lives.

Impressive, right?

All these reasons explain why Team SUS-GAWKY scored second place in the 2022 Meteor Hackathon. They won $1,000 cash and $700 in Galaxy Credits for their spectacular achievement.

🌳 You can view their deployment here!

Team SUS-GAWKY’s Journey with Meteor

The SUS-GAWKY tech stack includes Meteor.js, React, Bootstrap, Uniforms, SweetAlerts, Google Maps API, and MongoDB. They built CarbonZero with a Meteor App Template Project (meteor-application-template-react) to ensure they could complete their app in the short Hackathon window.

🤖 Check out the SUS-GAWKY GitHub repository here!

The team says they all had a Software Engineering course last semester (Spring 2022) centered around the Meteor framework (how cool is that?!). They all “love the dynamicness of Meteor and being able to easily see real-time changes on the website when a collection is updated.”

Gavin and Will both started building programs in Meteor after that Spring 2022 course. They enjoy “how fast and easy it is to deploy a fully functional application” using Meteor. Both of them are currently utilizing Meteor to work on a project for their ICS 414 course, where they partnered with the Department of Education to improve their bill tracking.

Yong-Sung has a bit more experience, as he’s been a Meteor fan for the last few semesters. “It’s really easy to work with, and I like how ideas can be quickly implemented into a functional prototype. Things just tend to work the way you’d expect.”

Yong-Sung believes that developing with Meteor allowed him to apply what he learned in his classes to things that more closely resemble finished products. “It’s helped me grow my abilities as a developer as well as my confidence in my abilities,” he says.

With her participation and learning from the Meteor Hackathon last year, Alyssia was more than ready to compete again this year as she enjoys developing architectures for applications that can be seamlessly built with a team using the Meteor Framework. Additionally, Alyssia added, “I think it’s really fascinating how Meteor challenges the traditional paradigm of client-server by using the DDP protocol and pub-sub pattern.”

Scaling with Meteor and Overcoming Challenges

When we asked the SUS-GAWKY team how they’ve scaled with Meteor, Gavin said he added Meteor Methods instead of previously calling his database queries in his ReactJs code. This allowed him to create more robust and safer code.

Most of the team learned semantic UI in their Software Engineering class, so transferring to Bootstrap took some getting used to. Gavin also described getting used to the No-SQL database as a personal challenge he overcame.

Additionally, they learned to use class components in React, but experimented with using functional components instead during the Hackathon. There were also times when the team struggled with scopes of various functions. However, they learned from their mistakes and got their components working in time.

Some other difficulties the teammates faced included:

Creating the Map Page

Gavin struggled with creating the CarbonZero Map page, as figuring out how to outline each area on Google Maps took a lot of work. He ran into issues with the map not displaying the correct information, drawing areas incorrectly, or areas overlapping. In the end, he solved this with the async/await functions and waited for each area to be drawn before drawing the next.

Creating Unity Frames

When Alyssia designed the dynamic Unity scene and converted it into iframes, she encountered issues with aspect ratios and shaders not exporting correctly. However, after systematic experimentation, she managed to make it work. Once she integrated and synchronized it with the sustainability scoring (smoothly accomplished using the Meteor framework), one more puzzle piece of the Carbon-Zero application was completed.

Form-Building Tool Uniforms

Yong-Sung says he “struggled a lot” with the form-building tool uniforms at first. According to him, “I think I tried getting creative with it without understanding how it worked, and that resulted in unexpected behavior. Eventually, I realized it was its own thing, and I stopped trying to incorporate incompatible components into it.”

What’s Next for Team SUS-GAWKY and the CarbonZero App?

The SUS-GAWKY team acknowledges that there’s room for improvement in their CarbonZero app, so they’ll continue to polish the experience while finishing their studies at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa. They hope to stay friends and play an even larger role in making the world a better place through software development.

“As we try to gain real-world experience through creating meaningful apps, we hope to make a positive difference in the world we live in.”

The SUS-GAWKY crew also entered their idea into a Breakthrough Innovation Challenge at their University’s entrepreneurship program: PACE (Pacific Asian Center for Entrepreneurship). We wish them luck!

Inspired to Build Your Next App with Meteor?

Meteor is a mature, open-source platform for seamlessly building and deploying web, mobile, and desktop applications in Javascript.

Developed for over a decade and trusted by industry giants, Meteor empowers you and your team to build and scale efficiently to serve millions of users.

You might not need to build an app in a week like our Hackathon winners, but today’s spotlight shows just how much you can achieve.

You can also read more about Meteor and what we do in this article on Website Planet.

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