Touch Grass

What could you create if you had 30 minutes to plan and 4 hours to build? Nicole, Ryan, Israa, Hosna, Joe, and Mark built apps to help us reconnect with the world outside the screen. Sponsored by Apollo and featuring Michael as our advisor.

The Challenge

So much of the software out there today seems to be reducing our connections — we talk to fewer people, have fewer reasons to go outside, etc. — so let’s build apps that help connect us to the physical world.

Face-to-face. IRL. Meatspace. Between no-contact deliveries and every AI app trying to replace another human relationship — from pair programming to therapy to romantic partners — it feels like so much of the technology being produced right now is designed to minimize, or even eliminate, our need to interact with other humans.

Let’s do our small part to change that. Your challenge is to build an app that encourages people to connect with the physical world and/or each other.

What helps you disconnect from the digital firehose and spend time making offline connections? Go in whatever direction inspires you, whether that’s a hobby, different ways to spend time together with other people, connecting to nature, or something completely different.

Your app should help ground your users and reconnect them to the world beyond their screens.

The Tool: Apollo Connectors

Your app must use Apollo Connectors as part of the build.

Apollo has been helping developers build flexible APIs via GraphQL since the early days of the technology, and Connectors make it possible to bring any REST API into GraphQL quickly and painlessly. This is exciting because it means you can extend your own data with third-party API data (or vice versa) to build out anything you can imagine without a lot of data plumbing hassle.

For this challenge, you’ll have access to a large collection of pre-built Connectors for everything from Pokémon to Stripe data to LLM providers like Anthropic and OpenAI. You can also quickly hook up your own REST APIs to a custom Connector.