STEM-In-Action Spring Scoop: Coloopate

We're back for another great week catching up with our STEM-In-Action grant winning teams. If you're just tuning in, 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 caught up with each of these teams in the Fall to see how their projects had been progressing since NJ&EE. Now, after a few months we are excited to see even more of their accomplishments. This week, we're headed to the Arizona heat to see how team Coloopate is changing the sleep game.

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We are Team Coloopate and we are striving to replace the traditional alarm clock, with a more effective and enjoyable alternative. We found through the use of temperature change people can be slowly brought out of REM sleep, contributing to more energy throughout the day. 

Through the course of the past few weeks we have been contemplating new ways to bring the cost of our overall design down. We plan to test on a wide group of test subjects, so having a low cost to make the blankets allows for a larger quantity to test with. Using the grant money we bought conductive tape, fabric, wire, and wifi controlled plugs to begin creating the new cost effective temperature solution. 

In the short term we are partnering with an ASU sleep study facility to monitor our test subjects and collect data regarding the effectiveness of our designs. Our future goals include a worldwide adoption of the superior and innovative solution we are generating. As well as fame, money, and glory of course. 

Our short term plans have been quite impacted by the current world wide pandemic(some of you may have heard of it). Due to COVID- 19, all meetings have been pushed to a virtual setting. Also the design process has been purely online. We have also had delayed shipping times and have inhibited supply of materials, leading to delays in our schedule.

Spreading the word is very important to generating sales of the design. We have attended multiple presentation halls at which we were able to talk about the solution we are making, at each of which we received a lot of attention and positive feedback. Through these promotions our design tends to be very intriguing and interesting to our listeners, as evident by our victory in our district science fair. Our solution solves a problem that almost all people have experienced, and the information about our project spreads very quickly due to that.

Moving forward we are most excited to use our design. Every morning we wake up drowsy and unprepared for the day, but once our design is completed we will not have to go through everyday feeling that way. We want to make drowsy mornings an issue of the past, and we are counting the days until that point.

The most Ideal outcome of our project would be overwhelming effectiveness and improvement in the eyes of our test subjects. Based on the data we have gathered from outside scientific research, we believe that it is a likely outcome of our design. Although we cannot be sure until the data has been collected.

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Who doesn't need a little extra help getting in the morning?! It always amazes us to see when our teams choose what seems like such common subject matter and take it and run with it on a global scale. That's just what Coloopate is doing because this device they are creating can, in fact, help people all over the world wake up a little easier. Now, that's something we can all agree on.

-Misson Control

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