Ocean Conservation Through Gamification
An eco-conscious mobile app that rewards users for taking real environmental action. Users complete sustainability challenges, upload photo proof verified by a zero-shot ML model, earn points, and engage with a community of eco-active people.
Ocean pollution is a critical crisis, but most awareness campaigns fail to drive sustained behavioral change. Users need immediate, verifiable feedback on their real-world actions — and a reason to keep coming back. Static apps with manual point systems are easy to game and hard to maintain engagement with.
Sea Score (also called SaveEarth) uses a zero-shot ML model to automatically verify photo submissions — no challenge-specific retraining needed. Users earn points for verified cleanups, collect passport stamps, redeem rewards, and follow each other's progress in a real-time community feed, making sustainability fun, social, and rewarding.
The backend uses Xenova OWLv2 (owlv2-base-patch16) via @xenova/transformers to validate photo submissions against challenge keywords. Because it's zero-shot, any new challenge type is supported immediately — no model retraining required.
Each challenge has a description, category (recycling, cleanup, etc.), and point value. Completing challenges awards stamps to the user's Passport, giving a visual record of cumulative environmental impact and unlocking milestone rewards.
A real-time community feed shows completed challenges across all users. Team leaderboards let groups compete on scoreboards. A Resource Hub provides educational content on reducing plastic waste and protecting ocean ecosystems.
Using a zero-shot model like OWLv2 traded raw accuracy for flexibility — any new challenge category works without retraining. For a hackathon with a broad scope of challenges, this was the right trade-off.
Firebase Realtime Database made the community feed and leaderboard trivially easy to implement with live updates. It removed a significant backend complexity that would have been hard to build from scratch under time pressure.
Passport stamps and visible progress created a sense of identity around environmental action. The social leaderboard added competitive motivation that pure point systems lack.
The singleton pattern for model loading was critical — loading owlv2-base-patch16 on every request would have made the app unusable. Pre-downloading and caching with download-model.mjs kept inference fast.
I'm always open to discussing innovative projects, internship opportunities, or environmental initiatives.