High-Level Project Summary
We decided to create a TikTok challenge to gather help from all around the world. This challenge will involve individuals searching their environments for beetles, performing a dance, and uploading a picture with the beetle while tagging their location. This helps solve the challenge by helping locate beetles and could be expanded to other insects. If the trend is kept alive, a record could be kept and the changes of that specific insect's life observed over time.
Link to Project "Demo"
Link to Final Project
Detailed Project Description
Beetles make up 40% of all known insects and 25% of all creatures, which makes them the most prominent animals on Earth. Additionally, beetles help prevent the overpopulation of other species and maintain equilibrium. Because beetles can adapt to all kinds of environments, by analyzing their behavior we can comprehend how the earth behaves in many differing kinds of places, including underwater. Because of their importance, we have chosen them as the first ones to track and test our solution.
Our project attempts to motivate individuals from all around the world to contribute to the tracking of insects. Given the prominence and influence of TikTok, introducing a new trend through their platform appears to be one of the most effective ways of reaching others. Additionally, if this trend proves to also be beneficial for the environment both sides win. What we hope to achieve with our solution is to increase awareness about insect life and promote the preservation of Earth.
Space Agency Data
We did not use any.
Hackathon Journey
Our Hackathon Journey was quite a stressful experience. Having to come up with an idea and a plan to solve a major challenge and carry it out in less than two days was quite demanding – especially with many of our members being already quite overworked with school and work assignments. Our team learned that preparation and cooperation are important to develop and effectively carry out a plan, but those are also quite dependent on the time available.
For us, the uniqueness and importance of beetles are what inspired us to choose the "Seeing the unseeable" challenge. Insects are quite difficult to track overall but, because of beetles' solitary life, locating them is even tougher. Our team resolved the setbacks and challenges through communication. By talking with each other, we were able to analyze the issues through multiple approaches.
We would like to thank the Beatles, for creating such beautiful and engaging songs, such as "I wanna hold your hand." Additionally, we would like to thank all of those who partook in our trend and sent us their posts.
References
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/318637848_Biodiversity_of_Coleoptera_Science_and_Society
https://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/article/side_O_0/beetles_01
https://www.si.edu/spotlight/buginfo/beetle
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/blog/2018/jan/25/why-beetles-are-the-most-important-organisms-on-the-planet
Tags
#beetles, #locator, #socialmedia, #TikTok, #challenge, #dances