Year 11 students using machine learning for the environment

Year 11 use machine learning for the environment

Our Year 11 Applied Computing students (Oscar Gorog, Teige Cordiner and Jared Roff), as part of their coursework, designed and developed an innovative solution to a problem of their choosing. As they summarised in their project, the aim of the solution was to provide an easy way for people to identify what bin an item belongs in.  Their solution is aimed towards everyone, especially younger children who have not been taught how to categorise garbage. Among other statistics, according to an ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) study of waste in Australia, 88% of recyclable plastics are sent to general landfills. Our goal is to lessen the amount of miscategorised garbage.

 After much work these students collaboratively created BinIt, a prototype solution which takes a photo of a piece of rubbish, uses a Machine Learning model to identify the item or predict the item based on its characteristics, and determine which bin the item belongs in (General Rubbish, Recycling or Green Waste) and then displays a visual prompt to show the user which bin to put it in. 

Congratulations to Teige, Jared and Oscar on their combined efforts to identify a real-world problem and then design and develop their solution to a highly functional prototype stage. 


Heath McGregor
MerIT Coordinator