Vega Optima - Space Apps Challenge

Vega Optima| What Is Our Carbon Footprint?

Awards & Nominations

Vega Optima has received the following awards and nominations. Way to go!

Global Nominee

What Is Our Carbon Footprint?

Your challenge is to identify local sources of carbon emissions and/or estimate amounts of carbon emissions for different human activities to aid scientists in mapping carbon sources and sinks. How can you inform decisions to adapt to the consequences of a changing world and aid policy makers in making plans for the future?

VSCarbon

Summary

Our project is all about engaging the public and making it part of the solution and even the solution itself. VSCarbon is centered on individuals while still being of a big help to scientists and decision makers.Our platform does not only calculate the carbon footprint for individuals, which is the main indicator for carbon emissions, but it also keeps track of your progress with daily challenges that will help you reduce your carbon footprint on a daily basis. We hope that our solution will help people from around the world learn about the current issues we are facing as well as how they can take action and have an impact while having fun.

How We Addressed This Challenge

Our team is proud to introduce « VSCarbon », a project that focuses on identifying local carbon emissions and aiding scientists in mapping the local carbon sources.

“VSCarbon” is a user-friendly, engaging and highly interactive app that intends to first and foremost serve an educational and informative purpose, on one hand, by providing to its users a simple stack of informations about the Carbon Footprint and calculate their estimated carbon footprint from their daily activities and keep track of its progress in time, on the other hand, the collected data from the individuals will be handed for scientific purposes to facilitate identifying local sources of carbon emissions.

Our app values, weaves the fabric for an inclusive community and encourages networking between its users. Through a series of real life challenges, the user will reduce his estimated carbon footprint, to gain Diamonds and Badges and improve his rank among the community and friends, and get to share his accomplishments with their friends.

And now to our biggest addition:“The League” ! A friendly competition between our biggest achievers to get a chance into winning actual awards and gift-cards provided by local eco-friendly startups that we partnered with. Through this collaboration, the startups will be gaining a better outreach to future potential clients and will get the chance to promote their products.

“VSCarbon” is a new tool to darn the social fabric of a community whilst engaging its users for a great cause and helping scientists to move forward into mapping CO2 emissions. Hand-in-and our users small changes could have big impacts into fighting against CO2 emissions: it’s now us VS Carbon !

How We Developed This Project

As a community, we are making significant change to the chemical constituency of the atmosphere and the oceans, one that is impossible to reverse, and when we look back to these days in the future we want to be able to say that we did the action that were necessary, one of the most changing factors in our climate is our carbon footprint. So, is there anything to do about it?

Knowing how much carbon footprint calculators there is, our challenge was to make VSCarbon as engaging, as fun and as informing as possible, using the skills we have and ones we acquired during the bootcamp, we were able make VSCarbon accessible not only from mobile phones, but also from computers, the website was created using HTML CSS and Javascript coding languages.

VSCarbon interface was created using Invisionapp as well as adobe photoshop; OpenAsapp helped us create a quiz app based on our Nasa data sheets, once answering the questions, the app provides you with your percentage score.

Unfortunately, as much as we wanted to launch the full version of VSCarbon, we were only able during this short amount of time to create the different features related to the app’s interface.

How We Used Space Agency Data in This Project

Space agency’s Data was of great help to our project. It was first used in the calculation section where we had access to excel sheets with factors to calculate the carbon footprint. We adapted those factors to our own local activities and we created a quiz from there to gather information about people’s activities and calculate their carbon footprint. We also used NASA’s Data in the news and facts section to display general information about carbon footprint on a larger scale. Finally, we used the statistics data to get an idea about the average carbon footprint in order to make individuals aware of the situation and state of their carbon footprint.

Project Demo

https://www.powtoon.com/online-presentation/dhkCuILN836/?utm_medium=SocialShare&utm_campaign=studio-share%2Bshare%2Bby%2Bowner&utm_source=studio-share-button&utm_content=dhkCuILN836&utm_po=32732647&mode=movie