The Great Pacific Garbage Patch — A Moonhack 2024 project
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, also known as the Pacific Trash Vortex, is a large plastic and floating trash collection. The trash is primarily fingernail size or smaller pieces of trash, filled with much smaller particles known as microplastics. The most recent research shows that it covers 2.6 million square kilometres of the ocean (approximately the size of Western Australia) with some of the garbage estimated to be over 50 years old.
This year’s Moonhack project, presented as a design brief, addresses this issue and asks young coders to create a call to action! How can we reduce this floating trash island in our ocean? How can we clean up the environment that is home to so many animals? How can we get people to prevent this garbage patch from getting bigger? These are the questions that this project asks.
Haven’t registered for Moonhack yet? Make sure you register here to be counted.
Resources
To create a solution for this project young people will first need to learn about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. The resources below were great inspirations for picking this topic for a Moonhack project.
Great Pacific Garbage Patch facts for kids — This kid’s encyclopedia page, run by Kiddle, is great for general information. It covers the history, sources of plastic garbage, size estimates, environmental issues, and removal efforts.
Ocean Rubbish — Behind the News released this story in 2015. Although this is several years old, the information is presented in a great video for kids to learn about this issue and presents great visuals to create empathy and action.
The Ocean Clean Up — Learn more about an organisation working to clean up the Great Garbage Patch. They also work in many major rivers across the globe. The organisation’s founder started this project as a high school student at 16 years of age.
8 Facts about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch — Learn some basic facts to help you get started. Further explore the many links for any particular area that interests you.
Did you know that the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, is not the only one? There are others such as the Indian Ocean garbage patch and the North Atlantic garbage patch.
About the project
Being a design brief, young people can code any solution that they like! This means that they can lean on their strengths and focus on being the creator of a digital solution.
Coding platforms that could be used include Scratch, Python, Java, HTML & CSS, Unity, MakeCode with micro:bits, MakeCode Arcade, OctoStudio, Scratch Jr, or any chosen platform.
Physical computing elements can also be used. Makey Makey, Spike Prime, Lego WeDo, micro:bits, Raspberry Pi, Arduino, EV3, VEX, or any other choice.
Testers
Our testers for this project came up with some great ideas. There were animations in Scratch, clean-up data collection using micro:bits, interactive website with HTML & CSS, and games in Scratch. Testers reported that they learned a lot about this global issue and were inspired by the actions of Boyan Slat, who founded the Ocean Clean Up, and felt they could make an impact as well.
The Coding Challenge
We are encouraging every young person to come up with a coded solution to cleaning up, or preventing further rubbish being added to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. We are excited to see what everyone comes up with!
The prize for this category is to have the winning project turned into a Code Club Australia tutorial that can be shared with everyone around the world. This project category is open to global submissions. What will you come up with?
Moonhack takes place from October 14th to 31st 2024. Make sure you register to be counted in this year’s numbers!
Kaye
Moonhack Mission Control
