SpecDex

Challenge

Turn children's phones into a reason to go outside and learn local species — with ecology-true rules, not edutainment. As the Porini president puts it: kids memorise 151 Pokémon; with the same memory they could know 151 native species.

Approach

A mobile-first PWA trading-card game. Kids photograph real plants and animals; Gemini identifies the species and mints a collectible card with IUCN Red List status, rarity mapped to conservation risk (critically endangered = ultra-rare) and stats derived from real food-chain roles. Duels resolve by true predator–prey and pollinator logic. Seasons, weekly quests, class mode for schools, referral tiers, promo codes (100 single-use Bartgeier Founder editions), postcard generator and a live public leaderboard keep players returning. Anti-cheat runs on screen-capture detection with a 70% stat penalty, and every scan is geo-tagged as a citizen-science observation — rare-species coordinates obscured. Public launch at Zurich Climate Week, May 2026; school pilots in Liechtenstein and Mauritius follow. A project developed and operated by Operal AG for Porini Foundation.

Outcome

Live in production with a public real-time leaderboard, launched with a 15-species alpine season at Zurich Climate Week and carried by a mascot-guided onboarding (Pori the fox, rigged 3D). The platform is now the game layer of Porini's school programme.