Hi! I’m Enoch Kang, a soon-to-be second year studying at UWC Atlantic College in Wales. I’d like to use this reflection as an opportunity to share my experience starting up an app project at my school.

We popularized and raised awareness about sustainability in our community with an app we made ourselves.

Eco-bricks is a global initiative to save, segregate and pack plastics into bottles to make sustainable building blocks.

Last year, there was a project that encouraged students to make eco-bricks at our school. Everyone liked the idea but few were engaged due to its tedious nature.

As an aspiring game designer, I believe in solving problems through design. We wanted to make making eco-bricks fun and rewarding with an app.

Our journey can be split into three steps. First, we developed an app. Next, we established our presence in the community by collaborating with other student-led events. Finally, we left a mark and made the first sustainable bench (using eco-bricks) at our school to give back to the community.

I’ll be focusing more on the school’s unique environment in this post, but you can read more about the project in my blog post:

https://fireworks-studios.medium.com/from-app-to......

This project was only made possible because of Atlantic College’s massive support for student led initiatives. Almost all the events that happen in the school are organized entirely by students, enabling us to really let our creativity and work shine.

Factors that made this project possible:

- The students’ enthusiasm

- The school’s official support

- Lighthouse’s support

The students at the college are all proactive and engage with initiatives with a lot of enthusiasm and support. Having proactive students that are aware of current global issues means that you can easily gather the support of your peers to start making a difference.

We pitched the app as a creative take on sustainability and instantly got the support of many students because they were also enthusiastic about tackling sustainability issues.

The school also supports all of the projects, either by making them official CASs or councils. Teachers and staff also actively engage with the projects providing tremendous support.

In our case, we needed maintenance staff’s support to build the bench. They were very supportive and helped us complete the bench even though they had no obligation to do so.

The Lighthouse is a department at AC that provides grants and support for students that are trying to kickstart projects. They connect students with alumni for mentorship opportunities and even hosted a Hackathon inviting students to come up with creative solutions to tackle food waste.

In addition to providing funding for the server costs and various expenses for our project, the Lighthouse mentors have been supporting the project throughout its development.

These are the three main factors that AC provides that enabled us to do the work we’ve done. I am truly fortunate to have the opportunity of starting an app project in this environment and I hope our work can inspire more passionate people to utilize their creativity to bring positive change to the world.