Aussie Animal Scavenger Hunt

Team Name

Fellowship Rocketship Milksteak Convoke

Team Members

Project Description

Aussie Animal Scavenger Hunt (AASH) is an educational product that will have kids learning an Indigenous language while adventuring outdoors searching for animals.

Scavenger Guides (such as teachers, parents or carers) can use our website to print out Animal Scavenger Hunt Maps for their local area. The Scavenger Guide also has a local Indigenous language dictionary with all the animals they can expect to find.

The scavenger hunt will begin with a language lesson to learn Indigenous animal names. Then, kids can then take their maps out into the field and check off each animal they find as well as writing the traditional Aboriginal name in the blank field provided.

Data Story

We are using the Gold Coast region as a case study to create a prototype product. The indigenous language dictionary has been sourced from the Yugambeh Museum. Fauna sightings and pathways data has been sourced from the Gold Coast City Council.

The Fauna sightings dataset has been transformed by merging in the Yugambeh Indigenous language dictionary. Our new dataset includes both the common and Yugambeh names for each animal.

Topographic basemaps have been sourced from QSpatial, the Queensland Government open spatial data portal.

After placing both the Gold Coast pathways and the transformed Gold Coast fauna sightings onto the map we discovered that these two datasets combined could provide further use outside the scavenger hunt. For example, another use we envisioned would be assisting hikers and bike riders in their awareness about what animals they might encounter on their journey .