STEM-In-Action Spring Scoop: Oh, Deer!

With Virtual Judging starting last week, we thought what better time to catch up with our STEM-In-Action grant recipient teams to see how their projects were progressing since we last touched base with them in the Fall. If you aren’t familiar with the grant or what it entails, the U.S. Army Educational Outreach Program (AEOP) STEM-In-Action Grant awards eCYBERMISSION teams up to $5,000 to develop their projects into mature and scalable solutions in their community. Five teams all over the country were awarded this prize and this week we are catching up with the Oh, Deer! team in Texas!

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Hi everyone! Team Oh, Deer here with an update on our progress since receiving the awesome STEM-in-Action Grant last summer! To refresh your minds or in case you’re just tuning in, our project focused on planting highly reflective and light-colored native grasses on the sides of roadways. These plants would reflect light from headlights onto the road. More light = a better chance to see deer and avoid a collision. The grant funds were going to be used primarily to purchase seed to be donated to the Texas Department of Transportation (TXDOT), as well as to pay for the labor to plant that seed on the shoulders of roadways.

Team Oh, Deer! at NJ&EE 2019

So far, our biggest challenge has been in the speed, or rather the LACK OF SPEED, in which state government moves! When selecting TXDOT as a partner, we never considered the oversight required at the state level. We thought the local transportation office could accept a donation of seed and extra funds for paying for planting, but it proved to be much more complicated than that! A lot of paperwork and bureaucracy has resulted, and what we thought would take weeks, actually took many MONTHS. Good news came last Thursday, and we found out TXDOT would not charge for their labor and could accept a donation of seed if the money exchanged stayed under a certain amount. This was exciting! It meant our project would FINALLY move forward this month!

Bamert Seed Company will donate seed directly to TXDOT and spring planting will happen just after the famous wildflower and bluebonnet explosion across the state, thanks to former First Lady, Lady Bird Johnson. We’re excited about seeing our project come to life LITERALLY across the roads of West Texas, and our team is grateful to AEOP for trusting us to fulfill the requirements of this grant. If your team has the opportunity to apply for this in April, GO FOR IT!

One of our real-time goals is to raise awareness of this inexpensive and sustainable way of lighting roads through greater media attention. Spring planting should result in grasses tall enough to reflect light by late April. Once we get out and measure the light and report the numbers of collisions decreasing, we hope to attract a news crew and highlight this work. In the meantime, Oh, Deer continues to post progress on our website and on social media, reaching out across the state and into our neighboring state of New Mexico. Ideally, we hope to influence other states looking for a natural way to decrease vehicle-deer collisions.

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Oh, Deer, are we impressed! So many preventable deaths in the United States are caused every year by automobile accidents. This team has seen the future in safe driving and are doing everything they can to prevent accidents in the future. A task worth commending. Keep up the good work!

-Mission Control