GrassQuest

What I Built
GrassQuest turns a short walk into a small discovery quest. It uses your browser’s location to generate a nearby waypoint, then invites you to head there, notice something outdoors, and write a quick reflection. An open-weight Gemma model classifies that reflection as Monsoon Water, Earthy Terra, Urban Flora, or Solar Heat. Your completed quest adds a colored “fog” area to your map, saved in your browser.

It’s for anyone who wants a lightweight nudge to explore their surroundings instead of spending more time scrolling.

Demo
Running live on Render - added rate limiting to limit the number of calls to the service, to protect against misuse of the service.

Code
GitHub link

How I Built It
The frontend is HTML, CSS, and vanilla JavaScript, with Leaflet and OpenStreetMap for the map. A FastAPI backend sends the reflection to a Gradio endpoint in a Hugging Face Space, where Google Gemma 3 4B Instruct runs on GPU and returns one of the four element labels.

The model is part of the core interaction: its classification shapes the quest result and the color of the completed area on the map.

Why Does Open Innovation Matter?
Using an open-weight model makes the classifier’s behavior something I can inspect and change—not a black-box API I have to accept as-is. The labels and instructions can be adapted for a different kind of outdoor activity, and the model can be swapped or self-hosted on suitable hardware.

GrassQuest isn't just open-source in code-it is designed to be completely free to build, deploy, and host for yourself:

1. Free Single-Service Cloud Hosting: Uses Render’s free tier to serve both the FastAPI backend and static frontend assets out of a single service.
2. Zero Database Infrastructure: Eliminates paid cloud storage or managed database costs by storing user exploration state natively in browser localStorage.
3. Zero-Cost Open AI Inference: Leverages open-weight Gemma 3 models hosted on Hugging Face Spaces, avoiding expensive commercial API subscriptions.
4. Fork & Customize: Anyone can clone the repository, tweak the prompt to fit custom elemental themes (or eco-tours), and launch their own community instance in minutes.

Prize Categories

• Best Use of Render