Google Award Come To Recycling Project 'We'

Çağrı Serpin and his friends, who developed a project where people can earn points that they can use in many areas such as transportation balance in exchange for giving recyclable materials such as plastic to vending machines, won the first place in the competition organized by Google.

In the People & Peace Hackathon, organized by Google Developer Student Clubs for 3 years, the projects of young entrepreneurs were evaluated. While the theme of the competition was 'Sustainable Development Goals', which was determined by the United Nations (UN) and consisted of 17 items, the entrepreneurs participating in the competition presented their projects in this direction. Competing in the People & Peace Hackathon, Bahçeşehir University (BAU) Department of Computer and Instructional Technologies 1st year student Çağrı Serpin and his friends were selected to recycle the recycling project 'We' among 22 projects. Young entrepreneur Çağrı Serpin gave information about the 'We' project, which set out with the idea of ​​recycling materials such as plastics and encouraging people to do so.

The device measures the air quality

BAU student Çağrı Serpin, who said that with the We project, can collect recyclable materials such as plastic into vending machines placed in places where people are concentrated such as metro, metrobus and buses, “People can receive public transport balance by giving materials such as plastic to these vending machines or by reading a QR code over the phone application. They can get virtual points. In addition, these points can be used as discounts in contracted cafes and places, or they can be sent to someone else as a gift. Gamification was used a lot in the content of the project. In this application, users can earn extra points daily and weekly. In the future, thanks to the sensors to be placed in the We devices, information such as air quality, air temperature and humidity can be written to the database and the air quality map of the city can be revealed. These data can then be used in scientific research. At the same time, thanks to the weight sensors in the devices, how much recyclable waste is obtained from each region can be mapped. This will support appropriate recycling studies in the light of these data in the future, ”he said.

We made recycling fun with gamification

Stating that there are many problems arising from the non-recycling of wastes in the environment, Serpin finally said; “If we can't say 'stop' to these kinds of problems, the problems that will arise in the future really worry us. For this reason, we started to develop the project called We with my teammates. People often avoid doing things they have to do because they are boring or because they have simpler ways. But when these responsibilities are made more fun with gamification, people start to play the game according to the rules. We, as a team, combined gamification technologies and recycling and realized this project with an innovative perspective. I would like to thank my team leader and teammates who made the project successful ”