The following idea was triggered by the article “Return of a castaway” in the 2012 September 17 print edition of the Christian Science Monitor about students at a school in Maine who launch (wine) bottles which enclosed messages into the Gulf of Maine every year.
A recent article on a school in Mass. that sends out messages in (wine) bottles got me to thinking about an alternative that doesn’t add to the ocean junk. Have you heard about user-friendly chain letters being used to teach lessons equivalent to putting objects in the ocean? Optimally there’d be a social app such that a recipient could check in anonymously (or not) and provide physical location information. That way the students could track the progression of their emails through social networks against a map. I suppose that a database behind the app could offer location and ethnic specific pictures and kid-friendly demographics that a recipient could select to include with her check-in.
Reply by Jean-Francois Barsoum: you’d have to find a way to add some randomness into the mix, because social networks kind of take that out.