Between the BBC's Gardeners' World team and Tesco, they decided they wanted to run an online gardening competition, the brief given to us being to produce something that was both educational for the users and fun - which would therefore hopefully be viral.

The site's aim was to promote Tesco's new savings account rates available from their Personal Finance team and the competition prize was a £1000 makeover to your garden. To win the competition, a user would have to grow the largest virtual plant by taking care of it, as you should do with your savings and investments.

The competition runs for a total of 3 months with each game lasting 14 days at a time. Users were able to play as many times as they liked and each day, the user's knowledge of gardening was tested by a daily quiz. An email reminder was also sent to all the registered users each morning to remind them to answer their question each day.

The daily question was multiple choice with one answer being fully correct and awarded 100% growth towards the virtual plant, another answer being half correct and therefore 50% growth awarded and the last answer being incorrect, therefore giving no growth. This information was displayed to the user after they had entered their choice to educate them on gardening matters and so it was very important to produce a system that would not ask a user the same question throughout the duration of the competition.

To gain additional growth, users were invited to play 'lilium Virtualis', an online plant game built in Flash. Users had to ensure that their plant was situated in the correct area of the garden for the right amount of time, that it was kept well fed and watered and that mould and bugs were kept at bay by spraying the plant with fungicide and pest spray.

The key technical issues in this project involved the synchronisation of the plant growth between the quiz score and that of the flash game. This involved many database calls and therefore performance concerns with the 40,000 plus consecutive users, but the solution designed was more than able to cope with this. We have since been requested for more sites like these so keep your eyes peeled!