Touch Grass 🌱: An AI-Powered Outdoor Challenge for Students

Touch Grass 🌱 — Turning Screen Time into Outdoor Time

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

What I Built

Touch Grass is an AI-powered outdoor challenge platform built for students at Jaypee University of Engineering and Technology (JUET), Guna.

In a world where students spend hours in front of screens, I wanted to build something that encourages them to step outside, explore their campus, and reconnect with the world around them.

The platform turns going outdoors into a simple daily challenge. Students can:

• 🌿 Discover daily, campus-focused outdoor challenges.
• 📸 Submit photos as evidence of completing challenges.
• 🤖 Use AI-powered image verification to help assess submissions.
• 🔥 Track their daily activity streaks and completed challenges.
• 🏆 Earn milestones and celebrate their progress.
• 📊 View their activity through a personalized dashboard.

The goal is simple: make spending time outdoors more engaging through small, achievable actions and a sense of community.

Touch Grass is designed for JUET students, but the underlying idea can be adapted for other campuses and communities.

Demo

Try the live application: https://touch-grass-vert.vercel.app

Explore the source code: https://github.com/RISHABH12005/Touch-Grass

The application is built with a responsive interface so students can access their challenges and submit photos from their devices.

Code

The project is open source and available on GitHub:

Repository: https://github.com/RISHABH12005/Touch-Grass

The repository includes the application source code, database schema, API routes, AI integration, and setup instructions.

I welcome feedback, ideas, and contributions that make outdoor participation more engaging and accessible.

How I Built It

I built Touch Grass using a modern full-stack web architecture, combining web technologies, database-backed progress tracking, and open-source AI tooling.

Technology stack

• Next.js App Router, React, and TypeScript: Application architecture, interactive interfaces, and server-side functionality.
• Tailwind CSS: Responsive UI styling.
• PostgreSQL and Prisma: Persistent storage for student records, challenges, submissions, and progress.
• Ollama and vision-capable models: AI-assisted image verification for submitted challenge photos.
• Vercel: Deployment of the web application.

The core workflow is straightforward:

1. A student registers and opens their dashboard.
2. The student views the available daily challenge.
3. They complete the activity outdoors and submit a photo.
4. The server uses a vision-capable AI model to help assess the submitted image.
5. The application records the submission and tracks progress, streaks, and milestones.

I integrated Ollama so the project can use a locally hosted model or Ollama Cloud, depending on the deployment configuration. This provides flexibility in how image verification is run.

AI verification is intended to assist the workflow, not guarantee that a photo proves someone's identity or physical location.

Why Does Open Innovation Matter?

Open innovation matters because useful technology should be something people can understand, adapt, improve, and build upon.

For Touch Grass, using open-source technologies and an adaptable AI integration makes experimentation more accessible. The project can evolve without tying its entire architecture to a single proprietary AI provider.

Ollama provides flexibility to experiment with vision-capable models locally or through its cloud service. This creates opportunities to explore different models, evaluate their results, and choose an approach that fits the application's needs and available resources.

Open source also makes collaboration possible. Other developers can inspect the implementation, suggest improvements, contribute features, and adapt the platform for their own campuses.

Most importantly, the idea itself is reusable. A university, school, or local community could build on Touch Grass to encourage outdoor activities, environmental awareness, and healthier digital habits.

I believe open innovation is not just about making code available. It is about giving more people the opportunity to learn, experiment, and turn an idea into something useful.

My Agent Session

I have not included an agent session link in this submission. If available, I may add a DevRelay session recording to document the development process and AI-assisted engineering workflow.

Prize Categories

Open-source AI is a core part of this project through its Ollama-based, vision-capable model integration.

I will select the applicable partner prize categories in accordance with the official challenge rules and the integrations that qualify.

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Built with the idea that sometimes the best thing technology can do is help us spend less time on our screens and more time in the real world.

Let's touch grass. 🌱