Inspiration
As youngsters who are concerned about environmental issues, I always want to contribute to the preservation of the Earth in some ways. However, most of my time is spent on studying and working; hence, it’s hard to get myself actively involved in environmental activities. I then turn to taking small actions like planting a tree. It is actually a good way to help protect the environment and to make our surroundings more green and relaxing. However, it is also challenging to nurture a tree as I lack certain knowledge about them. Considering these in mind, I have come up with a solution: I will plant a digital tree! But, can a virtual tree make impacts on our real world?

What it does
I finally created an original educational-gamification mobile app about planting trees – TreeQuest. It’s fun, simple, and easy to play, but it’s also informative and helpful. It is an educational tree-planting game that allows users to grow and take care of their own virtual trees, each of which then will be converted into a real tree planted by partner organizations. You can track how your converted trees grow up day by day and how they are gonna gradually cover the deforested areas. Also, it provides users with intriguing information and helpful tips about plants and environmental sustainability, with a view to enhancing their knowledge and awareness about environmental issues.

Further improvements
In the near future, I will continue to complete and update the app with several additional features, such as community, leaderboard, and so on, with a view to optimizing the experience of users. We will elaborate more on the “Tasks” in the Quests. The tasks will not only be around the game like watering the trees but also includes real-life actions which help to create green habits for users like biking or using less energy. We will try to develop a tracking app to measure that. We also plan to add some challenges where people within a local area can make beautiful DIY products from their own household recycled trash. At the end of the challenge, they can choose to keep them for personal use or to donate to us so that we will put them on sell for charity to tree planting organizations.