Project Title: ReefWatch Miami
URL of Project: https://codepad.app/edit/n409cmf9
Video: https://youtu.be/0HWhO5eVjqU
Write-Up: Our project, ReefWatch Miami, started with a mere activity in our math classroom. Everytime during a short teaching break, our teacher would put up a video of an underwater camera livestream, through which we saw a multitude of different fish species — getting surprised even by the sight of sharks.
Becoming fascinated with these finny sea creatures, our group members carried out some research in which we found that there is an existing decline in fish populations in Florida, some which happen due to rising sea temperatures or algal blooms. That’s when an idea sparked. If fish species are being put at harm on a coast so close to our homes, we desire to assist them. And what better way to do that than by linking a very familiar underwater camera to our cause?
Our goal was then set: we must find and identify fish in the port of Miami’s coral reef, monitoring their health through a non-invasive method –– an underwater camera livestream and the community’s help. Our website allows for students in classrooms to learn about marine life in Miami by viewing the Coral City Camera livestream embedded in our website, augmenting their civic pride as they contribute to the research and tracking of fish by identifying them with a given list and by playing the games on our website. We hope that our website not only engages the community, but also grants knowledge about something so crucial in our world –– marine life –– bringing more awareness to the sad decline of our sea friends’ populations. We also hope to inspire action in our community, especially through our fellow teenaged students.
While completing this project, we learned a lot about the various fish species in Miami, and found out that there are many ways to spectate the native fish of Florida, such as the Coral City Camera and the Lower Keys View, which also make it accessible for people like us to learn about marine life. Additionally, Micaela and Giselle had no prior experience in building a website, and with Eli’s help, they also learned how to utilize CSS and HTML in their code. Since they were most comfortable in using Java Script through the p5.js libraries, we also incorporated that in our code.
Although we had a lot of fun building our website, we did come across some obstacles. Creating the section to report our website’s bugs was a hassle, indeed, and took a lot of trial and error. We did not want to design a backend server, since we were limited on time when completing our project and it would be even more taxing to include in our website the downloaded software recommended by Google. This was especially troublesome because we had never done something like this before. However, Giselle then had the wonderful idea of linking a google sheet to the user input responses –– which also took a lot of effort and time –– but was successful! She stated that she felt immensely proud when the first fake bug she reported was linked to the google sheet. We can definitely say that the most rewarding part of our project was being able to see our website in action.
We also avoided using AI as much as we could, resorting to asking another group member to go over the website’s code when we ran into an issue or bug. If we, collectively, could not figure out a solution, we looked for assistance on Google, wondering if anyone has shared the issues we were having. If that did not work either, we moved to AI at last, each person utilizing the AI of their choice. When we could not figure out why certain graphics would not appear on the screen after our p5.js integration, Micaela used code.ai for assistance, through which we discovered it was the z index that was making the shapes overlap. Giselle also used ChatGPT for issues such as linking bug reports to our google sheet, which also required coding through Google’s Apps Script extension –– something we also had no experience with. Overall, our experience was very fun, and we learned about coding as we also learned about fish species in Miami. We hope to engage the community as we tackle this cause. Identifying and tracking the fish can only be done with our society’s help, just as saving our world is!
