Miracle - Space Apps Challenge

Miracle| Sustaining Our Planet for Future Generations

Sustaining Our Planet for Future Generations

There is concern worldwide that environmental issues we face today will have an impact on future generations. Your challenge is to create a way to communicate the importance of environmental responsibility to people of all ages.

Create active influence on Deforestation for a Sustainable Future through Social Media

Summary

The clearing of forests across the Earth is known as deforestation. Now it has become a great threat since it is caused to many environmental problems like global warming, soil erosion, etc. Deforestation can be happened due to humans' activities or natural causes. As our goal is to gather every generation to stand for a sustainable future, we thought the best way to reach them is social media and mobile phones in this modern world. We created a website to share knowledge and inform people about this threat and how to prevent this issue. And we use social media platforms like Facebook to share our website. We think to use currently popular trends.

How We Addressed This Challenge

Social media platforms have become a popular method of communication among people of all ages as it is an easy and faster way to stay connected with the community. The majority of the population worldwide are actively interacting with social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Viber, and Whatsapp. Almost all generations are aware of new trends on social media platforms like stickers, photo frames, challenges, etc. So these methods have a higher ability to take a message through society.

How We Developed This Project

First, we search about environmental disasters happening in the world and pick up some topics that most affect the life of the earth. Some of them are marine pollution, air pollution, extinction of living beings, deforestation, water pollution. As we are Sri Lankans, we thought about how these are happening in our country and how it affects us. Then we find out that deforestation has become the most priority environmental problem in present.

Then we thought of giving a message to all generations in our country. Without the age gap today everyone is mostly connected with social media applications. That is another major concern that leads us to this solution.

According to them, we thought to convey this problem, their effects, how it happens, reasons, and what we can do to prevent it through various kinds of new social trends. They are Whatsapp stickers, Viber stickers, wallpapers, themes, icons, Facebook challenges, profile picture frames to take this message to everyone. We draft designs for each of these initiatives in papers and making it real using photoshop, coral draw,etc.

Also, we thought to create a website to give more information regarding this. To create the website we use simple html5 and css3 with bootstrap and the implementation is done on the VS Code. Also for hosting the website we used the GoDaddy domain and firebase hosting.

Mainly we face some problems in creating a new type of stickers, icons, wallpapers because we need to create them more attractively to attract people of all age groups for informing this problem. However, we overcome that challenge and made some new creative things.

That is how we developed our project.

How We Used Space Agency Data in This Project

After we selecting the topic as deforestation we have to find more details about it. Therefore we used NASA reference materials to study more about this problem. There we find out why deforestation happens, the rate of deforestation, deforestation and bio-diversity, impacts of deforestation and so more.

Tropical Deforestation (earth observatory - By Gerald Urquhart, Walter Chomentowski, David Skole, and Chris Barber)
Tropical Deforestation (earth observatory - By Rebecca Lindsey • design by Robert Simmon • March 30, 2007)

Also, we get a video clip to observe the global-scale patterns of vegetation and we used it for our website also.

We used NASA image gallery to use in our website and to get ideas for stickers, wallpapers and other social trends.