Marine Microplastics Map

Inspiration

When coming up with the idea of this project, we wanted to focus on ocean related issues that didn’t receive as much attention. We decided to focus on microplastics, because a lot of people have a misconception around how if people can’t see pollution in the ocean, then it’s not there. However, due to the existence of microplastics polluting the environment without being visible to the eye, this cannot be true.

What it does

It provides various location dependent information from all over the world. You can interact with the data by asking the chatbot.

How we built it

We built this with a combination of hand coding and ai usage. We used ai mainly to generate the ui and debug our code, but we coded the way we use the ai models from hugging face mostly by ourselves. We also came up with the project idea and did the visual design ourselves.

Challenges we ran into

We encountered some challenges when deciding which coding language to use. Some of us wanted to use java, because it was the language we were most comfortable with. While other wanted to use javascript and html as it would be easier to implement with graphics. Eventually, we decided to use javascript, even if some of us weren’t as comfortable in that language, we decided that it was overall easier to use, and that we could learn it along the way.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

An accomplishment we’re proud of is finishing a functional project within the tight time constraints and coming up with creative features on our project.

What we learned

We learned how to collaborate within different skill levels and how to distribute work. We also gained experience in different coding languages, like css, Javascript, html, etc, in which some of them we didn’t have much practice with before.

What's next for Marine Microplastics Map

We aim to expand it to include current APIs rather than a JSON file. We also want to include more than just oceans and microplastics, extending it to plastic usage by type globally. We would also like to turn it into a product.