AstroCoders - Space Apps Challenge

AstroCoders| Quiet Planet

Quiet Planet

The COVID-19 outbreak and the resulting social distancing recommendations and related restrictions have led to numerous short-term changes in economic and social activity around the world, all of which may have impacts on our environment. Your challenge is to use space-based data to document the local to global environmental changes caused by COVID-19 and the associated societal responses.

ECOMATE- A small contribution to the Economy and Environment

Summary

This Lockdown,We observed many positive changes in environment.But these positive changes won't last much long after lockdown ends.By realizing that,we come up with idea to create an App which shows how lockdown has decreased pollution.So that when lockdown ends government can implement some kinds of strategy by observing which area are on Danger Zone through our App and What precautions can be taken.Also this app encourage local people to contribute by providing people challenges and rewards.

How We Addressed This Challenge

This project revolves around two aspect to addresses the challenge

Documenting Changes
Societal Response

1. Documenting Changes

So in this project we use an Android App to showcase the changes in the environment caused by the Lockdown. So once our idea fully complete and we fully development of this app as planned, we will show how Air, Water, Land and other pollution are reduced. User can see the past data of the environment and the Earth and compare to the present environmental data after the Lockdown so that the user could be sure that these changes are due to the COVID-19 pandemic. As per consideration of challenge, NO2 data will be showed in fully completed app with past 5 year old and now . So by this, user can easily know that reducing industries pollution, vehicle pollution and other pollution can have positive impacts on the earth environment, which will serve as a proof in future when any country plans to implement some strategy with goal to reduce pollution.

2.Societal Response

To encourage people we have some features. One of them is Alert feature which show whether the area you live in is a Danger Zone or not with some precautions so that state government can know that in these area some steps should be taken and while observing the past data we found that the Lockdown strategy is a proven way to reduce the pollution in the environment, by reducing gas emitting vehicles and replacing them with electric vehicles and modernizing industry. Similarly, government may focus on reducing the fossil fuel and preferring alternatives if that area is in extreme polluted condition. Similarly with some precautions listed, society people can take part in the journey to make Earth a better place for human, others animals and plants to live in. Local People can be a member of the Ecomate community where challenges and rewards are given to the people which will encourage them to contribute to Earth by doing small small tasks like planting trees, reducing waste thrown in coastal area, active ports, harbors, lakes and rivers, reducing fossil fuel consumption and so on and so forth.

How We Developed This Project

What inspired your team to choose this challenge?

After seeing how environment is positively affected by lockdown we thought we can further reduce pollution by contributing to the environment. Compared to past now its much easier to reduce pollution to normal level because lockdown have already done a lot of work on it. Which inspired us to choose this challenge.

What was your approach to developing this project?

Since we have to develop prototype app for this project in only 2 days we used Waterfall Approach. First we defined the requirement to all of our members then designed a plan and made in copy to show how our app should work. Then we moved in implementation part where we created App for the Project. After that we do testing of the app then app was given to other to test how they feel being a user and what changes must be done. Then the app was deployed to this website.

How did you use space agency data in your project?

Space Data was used to extract pollution level according to specific date and area and was showed in the app. Similarly, we use space data to evaluate how environment is having positive impact by locdown. We have also included some of the awesome and major links of NASA in our app which will make user feel, more comfortable and better knowledge about the world. We have also included the NASA world view feature to our App so that people can actually see the data from the space of anything they want to see.

What tools, coding languages, hardware, software did you use to develop your project?

To create App, Dart(Flutter) programming language was used.

For Video Editing ,vdsc was used

What problems and achievements did your team have?

We face a lot of problems while creating this system. Some of the major problems are:

Limited time to create App as planned.
Confusion on what challenge we must choose before hackathon begin.
Since all of us were participating the first time, we faced difficulty to be familiar with how this challenge work and how to get data for our idea.
Due to lockdown, we can't meet each other physically which lead us to misunderstanding of the ideas.

Despite the problems, below are achievement we have achieved in just 2 days

Able to create demo app to show how our idea can solve the challenge's problem, so that we can work in future to fully complete the app.
Despite of being unfamiliar with each other we were able to work in team for a single goal,
Learned a lot about how to work on a big project with limited time in hand.
Able to explore how NASA was providing a lot of data to local people which we can use in future ideas .