High-Level Project Summary
We have created an educational animated video which is intended to be used for students of any age from primary and secondary education to get acquainted with the problem of light pollution, to find out the harmful effects of artificial light pollution and the solution to this problem that depends from all of us. Through the animated video, students will receive information on how they can contribute to reducing of light pollution through interdisciplinary activity of measuring light pollution using constellations and participating in Globe at night project. In that way they are directly involved in the learning process and become citizen-scientists, while protecting the environment.
Link to Project "Demo"
Link to Final Project
Detailed Project Description
Our project is aimed to familiarize students with the problem of the light pollution and increase awareness of the seriousness of the problem. Also, students will inform their parents, brothers, sisters, friends, neighbors and so on, about light pollution. Although there are educational projects like Globe at night that measure light pollution and a lot can be learned about it, its adverse effects are not known by many people or some individuals know very little. With our project students realize about the harmful effects of the light pollution and they find out that can do something about this problem if participate in Globe at night project. Measurements of the light pollution made by the students they can sent online through the website of the Globe at night project. This helps to fight the light pollution, because scientists use our measurements. The students can conclude that to effectively combat the light pollution we all should be united or we need to act locally to make effect globally. There are many things that can be implied in order to reduce the light pollution. For example, the lighting fixtures should be improved, meaning we should use ecological lights of better quality which should direct their light more accurately towards where it is needed. These types of lights have all the necessary characteristics for one source of lighting, they are: ecological, safe, economical...Only these types of lights can lower the light pollution. Of course, we need to mention the awareness of each human being to rationally use the light and to safe energy in any possible way. We plan to publish our educational video with animations on the website of the Globe at night project (through contact with project director Connie Walker), as well as on the website of the International Dark Sky organization whose advocate is one of the members of our team. Also most importantly we would be overjoyed if our video was posted on NASA's educational pages as a good example of educating and promoting the importance of light pollution as a global problem.
Light pollution may look harmless at first sight, but it has deeper ecological and energetic consequences.
Using the Globe at night website you can send measurements online and get maps of the measurements that can be used to participate in various competitions, which is also very positive for students and their teachers to use. At the same time, it helps scientists who are researching this problem, and contributes to raising awareness of light pollution and the severity of this problem. Below are maps with light pollution measurements from our country for 2020 and 2021. Every dot is one single measurement. If the dot is lighter, the light pollution is bigger and if the dot is darker the light pollution is smaller.
The maps of measurements from any part of the globe are available at https://www.globeatnight.org/maps.php.
How can we all contribute to solving this problem?
On the photo below you can see the postcard for Globe at night for 2021 with all necessary dates for the campaign for measuring light pollution observing the brightest stars from some constellations.
For the project we used the Powtoon tool to create the educational animated video.
Space Agency Data
We used data from the Globe at night project and IDA. We have also used other data that we have the right to use, which are listed below in the references where the links to the websites are located. Also the photos that we used are our personal work.
The data we used from the Globe at night and IDA websites inspired us a lot because there are really wonderful and useful resources, important for every person on the planet and written in such a way that anyone can use them and become a citizen-scientist by measuring the light pollution and sending data over the Internet. These data are then used for scientific research by scientists, which greatly contributes to tackling the problem of light pollution.
Hackathon Journey
Participating in this project is really wonderful, with a lot of excitement and a great desire to succeed in such a short time to create something of what we are proud of. As today (October 2) passes, the excitement and desire for success grows with each step of the project. Today we practically live for this project. I know that tomorrow will be very exciting and full of ideas and inspiration for better realization and finishing of our project. We all always learn from each other whether the other is younger and less experienced than us. But we also learn from ourselves and we are surprised when the excitement, the imagination, the desire to create, the pressure to reach, to succeed everything is at its maximum and we face a new situation as if we are floating. But still we all are with smiles on our faces and we enjoy this activity.
We chose this activity because the desire to work on this topic was really huge. And we were sure we had chosen the right topic. We actually decided very quickly after a member of our team suggested the idea to us. He also explained some details to us, but then we worked out the idea and the realization plan as a team, as well as the way we will present it. We were most inspired to choose this topic because it can be treated locally, but if many people around the world are involved, it will have an effect globally. Also the solution is feasible just need to work on raising awareness about the problem of overuse of artificial light for advertising, lighting, alleged security, unprotected lighting, etc.
We worked as a team, first we divided the tasks, and then together we summarized the work done and all team members participated in the development phase, some of us directly on the computer. and others with valuable and important suggestions.
The second day of the project (3 October) passes, and we are nearing the end of the project. None of us slept enough, we are tired, but satisfied that we are finishing what we have planned. Many thanks to our mentor Burim Rexhepi for the helpful remarks.
References
List of the data and resources that we used to create the project:
- https://www.powtoon.com/new-dashboard/#/home
- https://www.globeatnight.org/ (Globe at Night is a program of NSF’s NOIRLab, the preeminent US national center for ground-based, nighttime optical and infrared astronomy, which is managed by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA), under cooperative agreement with the National Science Foundation}
- https://www.darksky.org/light-pollution/ (International Dark-Sky organization)
- https://www.moepp.gov.mk/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/9%20GLOBE%20at%20night%20B5%20%20-%20GLOBE.pdf
- http://dfrm.org/documents/macedonian-physics-teacher/t3.pdf
- http://learningwithinquiry.weebly.com/hunting-the-stars.html
- https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B17KmwXzTp9bbUhEajN3S3lnZ28/edit?resourcekey=0-1sx1Fc-mgwVrKQC5wE-okA
- https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B17KmwXzTp9bUFBkcDlSNUFMaEtVM0wxSm1xdmJnR3dtUGlv/edit?resourcekey=0-tRaS8S8MlZHIIfQuCJBZsQ
Tags
#light pollution #globeatnight #internationaldarkskyorganisation
Global Judging
This project has been submitted for consideration during the Judging process.