I Built EcoBingo to Make Touching Grass a Little More Fun

I Built EcoBingo to Make Touching Grass More Fun

This is a submission for the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 1: Touch Grass

What I Built

I wanted to build something that gives people a reason to put their phones down and spend a little more time outside. That's how I came up with EcoBingo.

It's an outdoor activity game built around a bingo board of small missions. Complete activities, earn points, build streaks, and take on weekly challenges.

I also added an AI Eco Coach. Tell it what you're interested in or how much time you have, and it'll generate three personalized outdoor or eco-friendly missions for you.

The goal is to make getting outside feel less like another task on your to-do list and more like something you actually want to do.

Demo

Try it yourself: https://ecobingo-game.vercel.app/

Here's the AI Eco Coach generating personalized missions:

And here's the weekly challenges and progress tracking:

Code

GitHub repository: https://github.com/aayushmalve/ecobingo

Feel free to explore the code and see how it works.

How I Built It

The app is built with Next.js, React, TypeScript, and CSS. I use browser local storage to save supported progress and preferences, so users can return to their progress on the same browser.

For the AI feature, I integrated Gemma 4 through Google's hosted Gemini API. The Eco Coach sends the user's preferences to the API and asks for three personalized missions. The server then validates the returned data before showing the missions in the app.

I'm using hosted inference rather than running the model locally, so the AI features require an internet connection and a server-side API key.

The rest of the app includes the bingo missions, points, streak tracking, weekly challenges, and progress persistence.

Why Does Open Innovation Matter?

I didn't need to train a model from scratch to experiment with AI in this project. Using Gemma let me focus on building the feature around an actual use case: helping someone decide what to do when they step outside.

Making the source code public also means other developers can explore the implementation, suggest improvements, or build on the idea themselves.

EcoBingo is a starting point, and I'd like to keep improving it. Sharing the code makes that easier than keeping the entire project to myself.