Using Robots to Remove Plastics From Our Beaches and Oceans
My students need Spheros, a pool and Samsung Galaxy Tab E Lites to do research, to learn coding and to program a device they engineer that cleans up plastic pollutants on land and in water.
$1,191 goal
Hooray! This project is fully funded
Hooray! This project is fully funded
Celebrating Hispanic & Latinx Heritage Month
This project is a part of the Hispanic & Latinx Heritage Month celebration because
it supports a Latino teacher or a school where the majority of students are Latino.
I teach at a Title I, performance improvement school with the majority of our students participating in the free lunch program. Many parents rely on a single income and some even work two jobs and still struggle to support their family. For many of my students, school is where they have access to books, supplies and other resources that support their academic achievements.
According to the 5 Gyres Foundation, there are 270,000 metric tons of plastic in the world's ocean which is equal to taking 2-liter plastic bottles stacked up on top of each other to the moon and back twice; I want my students to combine their learning on plastic pollution's impact on marine life with engineering and robotics to design solutions to remove plastics from our ocean waters and beaches.
My students are inquisitive and want to understand the world around them; I look forward to going to work every day to teach them, doing my part to prepare them for college and life! As my students grow older, it's important to empower them to feel they can make a difference in our world and for them to learn skills that will better prepare them to be career-ready.
My Project
Our use of plastics has had a negative impact on marine life. The 5 Gyres Foundation estimates that there are 5.25 trillion plastic particles in the world's oceans which have had a devastating impact on many organisms like birds, turtles, marine animals and fish that have been entangled in or have ingested this plastic trash. Through free lessons and resources from The NEED Project and 5 Gyres Foundation, I will teach my students about plastic pollution, how our choices impact the Earth and how people are working to come up with solutions to reduce plastic use and clean up plastic in our waters and beaches. Meanwhile, my students will also learn how to code and program the Spheros as part of this project using free resources from Code.org and Scratch.
Using the Spheros and tablets, my students will be engineers challenged to create and program a robot that cleans up plastic along the shore as well as create a robot that can be remotely controlled to pick up plastics floating in water.
My students will also use the tablets to do research on plastic pollution and to create a multimedia presentation of their choice to showcase their learning while teaching others what they have learned.
This project will draw on my students' creativity and tap into their critical thinking skills as they learn and then teach about plastic pollution's impact on the environment; through this project my students will also imagine and create solutions to a real world problem.
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As a teacher-founded nonprofit, we're trusted by thousands of teachers and supporters across the country. This classroom request for funding was created by Ms. Trochez MacLean and reviewed by the DonorsChoose team.
