STEM-In-Action Spring Scoop: Team Vision

In the last few weeks we have caught up with our STEM-In-Action grant recipient teams from our 2019 competition year and today we are getting the scoop from our last team. In case you’re just tuning in to these “Spring Scoops”, 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 for the past few weeks we have been catching up with them to see how their projects have been progressing since the Fall. Today we head out west to connect with Team Vision in Colorado and see how their anti-cyberbullying project has developed since we last chatted with them.

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We are Team Vision from Colorado. It’s been almost a year since we participated in the eCYBERMISSION challenge and our entry was “Kindly”, a service that we developed to prevent and detect cyberbullying, which can be invoked on a variety of different platforms. The solution is not intended to be punitive towards the bully. It is based on the latest technology in artificial intelligence and natural language processing and understanding.

Team Vision receiving their STEM-In-Action Grant at NJ&EE 2019

Since receiving our grant, we have been working on the application actively and improving it so that we are able to start rolling it out. The app is now fully functional and we are moving on to the next steps of our implementation. We even planned a launch event locally in our community.

Currently, Kindly has completed the beta testing phase, and we are hosting a kindness community event at our local library to launch and release Kindly. We are expecting around 30 - 50 students from our school district. Our district innovation officer will attend this event to support us. The community kindness event will not only provide insights into the solution, but the impacts of cyberbullying and an ability to volunteer for Children's Kindness Network to spread kindness. To attract participants, we have advertised including Kindly merchandise such as t-shirts and stickers. This is a chance to roll Kindly out and receive some feedback regarding the solution. In the future, we want to work with the Children’s Kindness Network to start implementing Kindly within classrooms and schools through their website.

Team Vision on DC Day during NJ&EE 2019

The primary challenge we faced so far has been the time and effort to complete the solution to a point where it can be user-friendly. We wanted to create a plugin for Chrome that can be included by all as well as by most social media platforms. The software cost was too much and the time to make it happen was not fitting in our launch event timeline. We requested help from an organization to provide us some directions and some sample code to create the plug-in instantly so that people in the launch event can truly use it and provide feedback.

We are very excited about our launch event and so far, our kindness community event posters and flyers have been added in schools. We are working towards adding in the local newspaper and around various locations in our community. We have invited a media company to the launch event. One of our team members, Gitanjali was part of a Marvel Hero Project episode on March 6th and she combined the launch event with the publicity for the Marvel Hero project in our local Fox Channel news.

Our most ideal outcome for “Kindly” is to have around 300-500 students using the service by June 2020 and seeing the difference. I believe that this would be a great stepping stone towards the future of Kindly as a whole and reduce the impact of cyberbullying.

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It’s amazing to see the progress these students are making on home front to prevent cyberbullying. Even more amazing, the fact they their app not only seeks to help those bullied, but the bully themselves, who often suffer from trauma of their own causing them to lash out. It’s a new and fresh perspective to look at the bullying epidemic in this country, and Team Vision has taken the phrase “Be Kind” to new and amazing heights.

-Mission Control

Colleen Minan
AEOP Communications & Marketing Specialist
cminan@nsta.org