# 🌿 TouchGrass Quest: Using Gemma AI to Help People Get Outdoors

For the Hacktoberfest 2026 Open-Source AI Challenge — Week 1, “Touch Grass,” I built TouchGrass Quest, an AI-powered outdoor activity companion designed to help people take a break from screens and spend more intentional time outdoors.

It's easy to spend hours looking at screens without making time to explore the world around us. TouchGrass Quest turns a simple outdoor break into a small, structured adventure.

Users can choose their available time and preferred activity style, then generate an outdoor quest with practical steps and sensory challenges.

The reported local verification results include a successful frontend production build, three passing backend tests, a successful backend health check, and browser testing of the main quest and reflection workflow.

Live Gemma inference has not yet been verified; the fallback mode has been tested.

Explore the code and setup instructions:

https://github.com/NirajDN/TouchGrass-Quest

My goal was to make spending time outdoors feel approachable. Rather than asking people to make a huge lifestyle change, TouchGrass Quest encourages them to begin with one small mission: observe nature, explore their surroundings, and take a break from the screen.

Building this project also gave me an opportunity to explore integrating open-weight AI into a practical application while keeping the core experience usable when an AI provider is unavailable.

I'd love to hear your feedback and ideas for making outdoor exploration more engaging!