This month I’ve picked out some super-cool projects from the national finals of Jugend forscht—and yes, I competed too! If you’d like to discover four standout entries from the 2025 competition, check out the June articles. ;)))

The third project:

From feed schedules to temperature alarms, running a zoo is a data juggle. A prize-winning phone app now puts every task on one screen.

Zoos keep mountains of records: what each animal eats, when the fencing was last repaired, which keeper is on duty, plus streams of sensor data for heat and humidity in every enclosure. The new app links them all. Keepers tap an NFC tag at a habitat gate, choose “cleaned”, “fed”, or “health check”, and the update appears instantly on a shared dashboard. The same screen tracks staff rosters, feed stores, medicine dates and visitor numbers.

Built-in rules compare live sensor readings with target values for each species. If a cold-loving snow-leopard pen creeps above its safe range, the app pings an alert. During a three-month pilot in a small German zoo, paperwork hours fell by a third and no feed or drug stock ran out.

The project took first place in the “World of Work” category at the national youth competition, demonstrating that smart software can be as helpful to animal care as nets and nesting boxes.