Growing Your Own Food – Are You Game?

The app Seeds the Game uses gamification techniques to encourage people to discover their green thumb and grow their own food.

Autor*in Anna Rees, 01.12.15

The app Seeds the Game uses gamification techniques to encourage people to discover their green thumb and grow their own food.

There is no shortage of apps and tech tools out there to help gardeners refine their skills or get newbies a-potting. The still-in-development app, Seeds the Game, looks to broaden its scope beyond just providing information about gardening by combining gaming techniques and social media principles to motivate people to get into growing their own food, whether it be on a personal level at home or by plugging in to local community farming projects.

According to the wesbite, once launched, the app will allow you to:

  • take photos of your plants at home, filter and share your attention to your real garden;
  • find neighbors to trade seeds with and share activities related to gardening and local food systems;
  • get climate and map updates for weather patterns relevant to your area and garden needs;
  • redeem seed points for real prizes like seeds and coupons for garden equipment;
  • and grow your own food and learn practices for permaculture and self-sustaining food systems at home.

The app has a global approach, aiming to connect communities across the world and open up a digital dialogue about local gardening and farming. The team behind the app, Grow Games Interactive, is looking to help people connect the dots when it comes to growing food facilitating information sharing, showing the link between food and sustainability and creating s shortcut to finding (or starting) community gardening initiatives.

The team at Grow Games Initiative recently completed a corwdfunding campaign to get the project going. People who donated were given access to a beta version of the game and, according to the company, those who have been testing the platform for more than a year have saved an average of more than 100 USD on food bills.

For more information, check out the video below or head to the website.

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