STEM-In-Action Follow-Up: The Marvelous Mosquito Marauders
After months of
catching up with our STEM-In-Action grant recipient teams, we have finally
reached our final one: The Marvelous Mosquito Marauders from Virginia. If you're new to the blog or you need a
refresher, 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 in 2020 ten lucky teams took home
the prestigious award. We were excited to see what this team had done at
NJ&EE, but we are even more excited to see the progress they’ve made since
then.
--
Hello!
We are “The Marvelous Mosquito Marauders”, 8th graders from Stone Hill Middle
School located in Ashburn, Virginia. Our mission is to reduce the number of
mosquito-borne diseases with ArboTrack, a crowd-sourced, geolocation, and
photo-based app that accurately locates areas of standing water. This year, we are using eCYBERMISSION’s STEM-In-Action
Grant to implement ArboTrack in both the local and global communities.
Over this past summer, our community in the Northern Virginia DC area experienced an increase in the number of mosquitoes as did many other suburbs in the Washington DC metropolitan area. As we researched this further, we came across the news article, which reported the DC metro area had the worst mosquito problem among the several metropolitan areas in the United States.
With
the STEM-in-Action Grant, our team plans to incorporate a machine learning
algorithm in our app to filter out pictures that don’t represent areas of
standing water or mosquito breeding grounds. Currently, we have created the
first version of our machine learning model that has an 80% accuracy rate. This
model can push predictions of images back to the app database. We also plan to
publish ArboTrack to the Apple App Store and Google Play store and then
integrate our app with Mosquito Abatement Agencies' Software. Throughout this
year, we will post our updates on our social media accounts such as Twitter,
LinkedIn, and Facebook and set up webinars and virtual events to spread the
word about ArboTrack!
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Another team
taking on not just their own community, but the world…one mosquito at a time!
We have been truly astounded by the intellect and determination of this team
(and all our SIAG teams, for that matter) and cannot wait to see how ArboTrack
will progress in the Spring. Catch The Marvelous Mosquito Marauders and all our SIAG teams in a few weeks to see how they are planning to end their year-long grant
and where their projects will go next.
-Mission Control
Colleen Minan
AEOP Communications & Marketing Specialist
cminan@nsta.org
AEOP Communications & Marketing Specialist
cminan@nsta.org
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