Nature by Friends

Nature by Friends is an outdoor nature adventure for children aged 6–10, built for the DEV Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge “Touch Grass” week in October 2026, and live right now on its Render deployment. Its premise flips the attention economy on its head: “Most apps want one more tap. I built one that sends kids outside.”

The guiding rule is woven into every screen: “Become a friend, not an owner.” There is no catching, no collecting, no points, streaks, or timers. A child succeeds by noticing something quietly, from a respectful distance. Every mission follows the same loop: meet one of 20 hand-drawn nature friends (frog, snail, moss, mushroom, crow and more), take on a tiny mission, respect its boundaries, put the phone down with a trusted adult, reflect, and keep the memory in a nature journal. Not finding anything is a valid ending — the app really says: “That’s completely okay — friends don’t always show up.”

Core modules: the Nature Garden (20 illustrated friends with real facts, habitats, safe-observation tips and things-not-to-do lists), the Listening Corner with Sound Safari (hear a creature’s call, guess who made it) and The Quiet Minute (a guided outdoor listening exercise), the Friendship Web (37 hand-written connections linking the 20 friends with the sun, a pond, fallen leaves and soil, explored through an interactive map), Tiny Nature Stories (20 short stories mixing imagination with real facts), a nature journal stored in the browser’s localStorage with “then and now” return-visit comparisons, and a plain-language grown-ups page covering outdoor safety and privacy — including a delete-all-my-data option.

It is genuinely vibe-coded: author Ansh Varshney writes in his dev.to build log, “I built Nature by Friends during this challenge week with Claude Code as my pair programmer, working in the terminal and desktop app.” The stack is Next.js, React, TypeScript, Tailwind CSS and MongoDB (curated profiles live in MongoDB Atlas with a bundled fallback). The open-source repo carries 59 Vitest tests covering the safety rules and model-output sanitizer, with CI running lint, type checks, tests and a production build on every push.

AI is used sparingly and safely: an optional photo helper lets a grown-up ask Gemma 4 for a cautious identification guess — always worded “might be”, with GPS/EXIF metadata stripped on-device before upload, and risky finds (wasps, spiders, mushrooms) triggering a “tell a trusted adult” message. Safety advice always comes from hand-written curated content, never from the model. ElevenLabs text-to-speech narrates all 20 profiles, missions and stories, since not every 6–10 year old is a confident reader. All 20 nature friends are original hand-built SVG characters — no stock images.