Welcome to the Detect Microplastics app.
Just to give you an overview, here are the basic questions I'll be covering in this first post.
- What can the app do?
- Why did I create the app?
- What is its purpose?
What can the app do?
My app's main feature is the scanning of products and recognition of microplastic ingredients in everyday products. The key idea behind this is just taking a photo of the back of your products and boom. You're done.
The following video shows you how everything is done:
Why did I create the app?
The initial reason and inspiration for the app is a Grade 10 Personal Project. This was a project where we got time over the course of a few months to explore a passion of ours. Initially, I wasn't really sure what to do. I brainstormed for a while and came up with a few other ideas like building a drone, but in the end, I decided against it.
Coming up with the idea for this app combined a variety of my genuine interests. Not some fake passions that I made up for my college application, but something I'm genuinely interested in. And these areas are for me generally math, science, technology and coding.
Had I not had an actual interest in these subject areas, I don't think I would have ever spent so much time on this and put lots of effort into it.
So knowing that, I thought about a few things like creating engaging science programs for kids, to get more of them into STEM. And my other idea was - drumroll please - this app. Coding an app seemed like it would combine all the aforementioned interests: requiring coding and knowledge of technology to be able to develop the actual app.
But it also combines these areas with an important environmental issue. Something we need to take action against. A problem that I want to do something about.
What is its purpose?
Now, you might be thinking, hmm, that sounds great and all, but what is the app actually used for and what can be done with it? The major purpose is simply to get people to stop using microplastics. But of course, we can't just do that in one easy step.
So first, we need to make people aware that these small particles are in the things they use every day!
But we also need to educate everyone about the dangers of microplastics: we need people to know why they should even care about them.
And once we've done these two things, we can start getting rid of the microplastics in our products. We can tell the companies that discreetly throw these tiny pieces into shampoo, toothpaste, body lotion and much more, that they are dangerous and that they need to be removed.