STEM-In-Action Fall Follow-Up: No Vape Possible

Another Friday, another Fall Follow-Up! In case you're just tuning in for the first time, (first, welcome to the blog!) every Friday this Fall we have been catching up with our SIA grant recipient teams to see how their projects have progressed since attending our National Judging & Educational Event (NJ&EE) back in June. 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. Normally, we award this honorary grant to five teams, but this year ten lucky teams took home the prestigious award. This week, we are heading to the midwest to see how some middle school students from Illinois are tackling the vaping problem in their community.

--

We’re team No Vape Possible, from Granger Middle School in Aurora, Illinois. Our team consists of Nidhi Sagaram, Samil Sharma, and Viraj Vyas. We got involved in eCYBERMISSION through one of our teammates, Nidhi. After we discovered this amazing program, our passion for science brought us together as a team.

At first, it was hard for us to find a problem to address. But then, we looked at one of the biggest problems in our community: vaping. During our research, we learned that hundreds of people die each other, and thousands more die. The solution that we proposed was to educate our peers on the dangers of vaping.

We first gave them a survey to test their knowledge of vaping. Our peers knew very little about vaping. We then gave them a presentation to inform them about vaping and it’s harmful effects. Finally, we gave them a second survey to see how much they had learned about vaping from a presentation.

Our results showed that they had learned much more about the dangers of vaping, and many more said that they wouldn’t vape in the future. This led us to the conclusion that educating our peers on the harmful effects of vaping would cause them to be less likely to vape in the future. We plan to use the amazing opportunity of the Stem-In-Action Grant to enhance our project in many more ways, such as enhancing our No Vape Website, disturbing No Vape materials such as pencils and computer stickers, and doing more awareness presentations.

--

These kids are saying "no" to vaping and "yes" to bettering there community! We are blown away by their ideas and progress since impressing us at NJ&EE and we cannot wait to catch up with them in the Spring.

-Mission Control

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