CLIMACT
During a sustainability competition, four students came up with an idea. What if you could gamify climate action? ClimAct is an app that will encourage youth to participate in personalized activities to lead a sustainable lifestyle. Using a carbon footprint calculator, students will be able to see how great their impact is on the environment and earn points by completing activities to reduce that footprint. As the ClimAct team continues to develop the app, their goal is to have educators implement it in their classes as a tool to empower students and show them how they can have a personal positive impact on the climate.
The idea for ClimAct came about when a group of four youth students took part in a competition about sustainability. The task was to present their solution to a sustainability issue, and they came up with a climate change app for youth. To engage teens, the app would calculate their carbon footprint and use features such as points, rewards, and a leaderboard to encourage their engagement. Now this project has being picked up by an Apprentice Garage team. In collaboration with several schools, they have developed a prototype of the ClimAct app, which will now be aimed at classroom use. They hope that their app can be used by teachers as part of climate change learning and inspire students to continue making sustainable choices beyond those classes and into the future.
TEAM MEMBERS
Amy Penney
Second year in Math and Computer Science at the University of Victoria
Adam Bookout
Software Engineering undergraduate student at the University of Victoria
Fanny Weber
Second-year undergraduate in commerce at the University of
Gabrielle Aparecida Pires Alves
Master’s degree in computer science at the Universidade de Sao Paulo in Brazil
Manish Sihag
Graduate research student in the Computer Science department at the University of Victoria
Kezia Devathasan
Project Ambassador
COMMUNITY PARTNERS
A team of 4 students aged 12-15 all from different schools (Matteo Carere: 7th grade at Ecole Brodeur, Sebastian Damian: 7th grade at Ecole Brodeur, Thea Damian: 9th grade at Claremont secondary, Zeinab Guitouni: 9th grade at GNS). They entered the Westmont Design Challenge competition, which was a design challenge towards a sustainability problem, with no intention to win, but for the learning opportunities instead. They ended up winning first place in the competition with a video of our plan for the app.
They hope to make a difference with their app and help guide teens in the right direction in maintaining an eco-friendly environment. They hope to have a working MVP by the end of the summer and have it adopted in schools on the island in September!