STEM-In-Action Spring Scoop: No-Vape Possible

Welcome back to another week of catching up with our STEM-In-Action grant winning teams! If you're just tuning into the eCYBER Blog, we've got the scoop! 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. Typically, we award this honorary grant to five teams, but in 2020 ten lucky teams took home the prestigious award. Today we're chatting with No-Vape Possible, a team striving to end the vaping problem in their community.

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Hi there again! We’re Team No-Vape Possible from Francis Granger Middle School, consisting of three 7th graders: Nidhi Sagaram, Samil Sharma, and Viraj Vyas. We’ve been working to stop vaping in our community. Our project was about educating our fellow peers on the dangers of vaping. First, we gave an anonymous survey to our classmates about how much they knew about vaping. Many of them knew little to nothing about the topic, and some thought that vaping once in a while was okay. We then gave them a presentation covering dangers of vaping and the harmful chemicals inside of them. We then gave them a second survey to see how much our peers had learned. Many said they knew a lot more about the subject, and none said it would be safe to vape once in a while.

Since when we first received the grant, we’ve done a lot of things. To help spread our message of non-vaping, we created branded No-Vape Possible collaterals . We created pencils, wristbands, and computer stickers, each branded with our No-Vape Possible logo and colored black. We plan to use these to help spread our anti-vaping message by giving them to schools, libraries, Boy Scout troops, and more. So far, we’ve distributed some of the materials to some schools, and plan to continue this in the future. We also used the grant to expand on our No-Vape Possible website. Previously, we had made a website to educate people on the dangers of vaping. However, this was made on Google Sites and wasn’t the best quality. But with the grant, we purchased a professional website-maker membership and made notable progress on our new and improved No-Vape Possible website. 

But our project wasn’t always smooth sailing. We encountered a lot of road bumps along the way. One of them was our No-Vape collaterals. Our original plan was to order them, go to one team member’s house, count them, organize them, and distribute them to various locations. But because of COVID-19, we couldn’t do that. Instead, we had Nidhi count the collaterals with gloves and safety equipment. We then distributed them to schools while observing proper COVID-19 guidelines and remaining 6 feet apart. 

As a team, we eagerly look to the future. We really want to continue distributing our collaterals to others and spread our message more. In addition, we’re really working hard on our website. It’s coming along really good and we’re making tons of progress. Perhaps the thing that we’re most excited about is presentations. With COVID-19 restrictions loosening up in our state, we hope to start giving in-person presentations at our local parks and public areas, as it’s much more engaging than over a screen.

We’ve done a lot so far on our project. The Stem-in-Action grant has allowed us to expand our project to another level. But we’re not stopping. We’re going to continue and make it even greater throughout the year. Stay tuned!

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Vaping, especially among young people is becoming a growing problem by the day in the U.S. and team No-Vape Possible is taking it head on. We support them on their mission to help their peers combat this addictive problem and we know that they will make a greater impact than just their immediate community.

-Mission Control

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