Page 8 - IAV Digital Magazine #544

iAV - Antelope Valley Digital Magazine
By Ben Hooper
March 25 (UPI) - - A fifth-grade class in Indiana is aiming to spread a little happiness with a special hotline titled, "When Life Gives You Lemons, Call a 5th Grader."
Cheryl Can Laeken, who teaches fifth grade at Milford School in Wawasee, said she came up with the idea for the phone line with her class after reading about a
similar project by a California kindergarten class.
"The world is really chaotic, it's kind of dark," Van Laeken told WSBT-TV. "On the news it's kind of hard to find a good news story to share with kids right now. I teach my kids to be positive and do good things for other people and this just seem like a really easy way to get my kids thinking about others."
The phone line, 574-832-4965 offers five differ- ent options in English and Spanish, includ- ing jokes, advice and inspirational quotes.
There's also a feature for callers who simply want to get a taste of fifth-grade educa- tion.
"They read some random facts that fifth-graders should know," Van Laeken told WNDU-TV.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o6x4sNIBJCs
Florida Non-profit Cleaning Beaches With Litter-sifting Robot
By Ben Hooper
March 25 (UPI) -- A Florida nonprofit has enlisted the help of a unique robot to clean cigarette butts, bottle caps and other small pieces of litter from the state's beaches.
The nonprofit Keep Florida Beautiful said the beach cleaning robot, BeBot, was donated to the group by Surfing's Evolution and Preservation Foundation.
"It is meant to go over soft dry sand and it sifts the very top layer of sand, removing very small pieces of debris that are often missed in manual cleanups," Savanna Christy, executive director of Keep Florida Beautiful, told
WKMG-TV.
Christy said the robot is not yet sensitive enough to clear microplastics, which measure 5 millimeters and smaller, but it can sift out anything larger than a squared centimeter.
"It does pick up plastic frag- ments, bottle caps, cigarette butts, plastic straws, food wrappers -- you name it, it's picking it up and sifting it out of the sand," Christy said.
Keep Florida Beautiful is the first nonprofit in the
nation to use the remote- controlled robot for beach cleaning, the organization said.
Indiana Fifth-graders Aim To Spread Happiness With Special Hotline