EcoEncounters

EcoEncounters simulates wildlife encounters for individuals to learn wildlife etiquette through fun bite-sized chats on Telegram.

Meet the team

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Hi! We're Team Kreta and we're grateful to be part of this hackathon. We're ready to learn and stretch our creative muscles as we develop a product people love! See you around :)

Team members: Nysha Tan (Design/Product), Kianne Lim (Design/Product), Lin Zhenming (Product/Software Engineer), Srushti Ganesh (Product/Data Analytics)

Problem statement

Singapore residents find it difficult to coexist with wildlife. By 2030, the goal is to have 9 in 10 homes within 400m of a park. Yet, local residents are intolerant of wildlife due to low childhood nature experiences (Ngo et al. 2022) and remain having little to no knowledge on wildlife etiquette (ACRES, 2024).

Intolerance instances manifest as mounting complaints to Town Council who are pressured into unnecessary culling of wildlife. In 2023, NParks received nearly 15,000 cases of pigeon-related feedback while the Government received about 2,500 cases of monkey-related feedback. ACRES also handled 990 human-wildlife conflict cases.

Currently, the means to educate the public on wildlife etiquette is limited to park signages and lacks visibility in neighbourhoods. Promoting wildlife etiquette encourage positive human-wildlife interactions before conflict occurs.

Proposed solution

EcoEncounters simulates wildlife encounters for individuals to learn wildlife etiquette through fun bite-sized chats on Telegram. Learn the appropriate actions and behaviours around animals!

Participants are encouraged to continue their learning through badges they earn through daily interactions with the game. These badges can be easily shared to social media and can attract curious friends who want to take part too. Although our MVP focuses on the topic on Macaques, the game can be scaled to other wildlife topics in future.

EcoEncounters is first targeted to nature-loving zillenial parents as:
1) They raising the next generation of children living in the City in Nature.
2) They are early adopters of new activities to entertain their children and are eager promoters of positive experiences in their respective social media, nature and parental groups.