PETPET

PETPET is a​ mobile educational application that helps elementary school teachers doing environmental education specifically helping them teach about the impacts of using bottled water. The application will “adopt” everyday leftover PET plastic bottles as virtual pets in children’s smart devices. One of the “PET” in PETPET represents the animals k​ept primarily for a person’s company or protection,​such as cats or dogs, and the other ”PET” represents P​olyethylene Terephthalate, a kind of industrial plastic material g​enerally used in packaging such as water bottles.

PETPET is developed based on the latest ios 8 coding language Swift by connecting open source Camfind image recognition API to identify the types of bottles. According to the result of image recognition, PETPET generates corresponding digital bottles from all available bottled water brands in the market. It compresses the long break down process into one week, and each bottle has its own timer separating three bottle status:New, Twisted, and Pieces.

There are three missions in PETPET which will be triggered either by the timer of each bottle or iPhone’s built in ambient light sensor. Every mission simulates one impact directly caused by using bottled water. During the one-week-long period of time, children will be able to collect bottled water in PETPET, view the changes of bottle status, and find a solution to overcome the missions.

The whole process is designed to be completed about one week, and there is an corresponding lesson plan which functions as a guidance for teacher implementing and adjusting the content to fit school’s’ curriculum. In order to show the whole process in the exhibition, the three missions will be demonstrated separately on three smart devices. So,the visitors can fully experience the image recognition and three missions in a very short period of time.