WWU computer science students partner with the Western's SEA Discovery Center for their senior project

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WWU computer science students partner with the Western's SEA Discovery Center for their senior project

June 5, 2025

by Lili Luna Cruz

WWU Communications intern

WWU Computer Science Students have partnered with the WWU SEA Discovery Center in Poulsbo on a project to develop the aquarium's sea plankton game, set up underwater cameras, and update the center's water monitoring systems.

Ryan Musto, Auggie Tell and Branford Coleman began working with the SEA Discovery Center during fall quarter as part of their department's senior project.

"I didn't even know that Western had a SEA Discovery Center, but I thought it was really interesting and wanted to get more involved," Coleman said. "I really liked the idea of working on different devices that help educate people about aquatic life."

The first part of the project involved maintaining and updating a code for the water monitoring system in the center's aquariums. This device records water conditions like temperature, water levels, pH and salinity. The eight sensors periodically check the water conditions and if they detect something out of normal range, the system alerts the web server and sends out an email to the aquarium administrators.

"This project was especially important because the SEA Discovery Center is mostly run by volunteers which means taking measurements by hand for every tank can be hard and really time consuming," Coleman said. "It takes a lot of specialized equipment to monitor the water, so they were looking for a way to automate it to reduce the workload on volunteers."

The team also wrote the code for a live streaming underwater camera placed underneath the center's floating dock that broadcasts the wildlife in the area like seals and fish. Once the project is completed, the live stream footage will be available on the center's YouTube channel.

The final phase of the team's project included updating the aquarium's educational touchscreen plankton game.

"The game teaches you about the life of plankton and you get to feed different sea creatures," Coleman said. "As you click through the game you get to grow and raise the sea creature you chose."

A large portion of the project involved polishing and fixing existing code, a process that required a lot of trial and error.

"They had some issues with their systems crashing and various other problems so that was the main thing we had to do, figure out what was going wrong," Coleman said.

In the end, the code developed by the students helped ease the aquarium volunteer's workload, teach visitors about the life of plankton and bring views of aquatic life to people's homes. After graduation, Coleman said he hopes to continue working on impactful and meaningful projects like this one.

"I like being able to build cool, interesting things that people will use," Coleman said. "As long as I get to contribute to a project in any meaningful way, that is good enough for me."

Learn more about Western's SEA Discovery Center in Poulsbo here!