STEM-In-Action Fall Follow Up: Team Tyres

Hello again! It's time to check in on our STEM-In-Action Grant winning teams! Over the next few months we will see posts from each of our winning teams to find out what they are up to this fall. In case you're just now 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. Typically we award this honorary grant to five teams, but this year ten teams took home the prestigious award. The next team we're catching up with is Team Tyres!

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We are Team Tyres, Hannah, Layla, Paul, and Joe. We come from three different schools, St. Paul’s Lutheran, University School, and Bay Middle School but are united in belonging to Bay Sea Scouts in Bay Village, Ohio. During the winter months when we cannot go boating we use the eCYBERMISSION STEM Competition as our program looking at community marine environmental problems.

Our online research showed that poor vehicle tire maintenance increased the amount of plastic microparticles tires shed, contributing to the pollution of our environment. The secret is to maintain proper tire pressure and tread. To do that, gauges are used, and with our STEM-In- Action grant, we will provide 500 of those gauges.

The goal was to package a kit ready to hand out at the Bay Days Fourth of July fair. The kit would contain a pressure gauge and a tread gauge in a zip-lock bag, along with a flyer explaining the importance of properly maintained tires. Everything came together in time. We received the grant, ordered and received the gauges and flyer insert with a day to spare, and were able to assemble the kits the morning of the fair's start. After pizza and pop for lunch, we had assembled most of the kits. The Bay Village Green Team, a group of environmental activists, and the Police Auxiliary had agreed to distribute from their fair booths the tire maintenance kits. It was a short walk from the boat club where we had put the kits together up to the fairgrounds, where we had an appointment with the Police Chief. He welcomed us to the police booth and congratulated us on our eCYBERMISSION project, and said the police would be pleased to hand out the tire maintenance packets. Joe and his friend attended the Green Team booth on Saturday, the busiest day of the fair, and handed out the kits. Joe said, “Most people wanted to pay for the kit but we told them it was free if they planned on using it”. They were very well received.

Our next trip was to go out on Lake Erie with a fishing charter captain to catch walleye. We would be shown how to remove their stomachs and fillet them. We would dissect the stomachs and observe the contents in a microscope looking for plastic particles. This would be done after we had our fish fry.

The weather, clear blue skies and a gentle NE breeze, started off great the Sunday afternoon we chose to meet Capt. Mike and his boat at the Huron City Marina. As we boarded the fishing boat we noticed the wind had picked up. Motoring downstream to the lake we also noticed all the boats heading in from the lake, we found out why when we reached the mouth of the river. The wind had really picked up, it was blowing 15-20 knots and there were 5 foot waves. We postponed our fishing trip to another, yet to be determined, day.

Thank you eCYBERMISSION for our STEM-In-Action Grant. We made up 500 tire maintenance kits but will report on our fishing trip and trip to the O.S.U. Stone Laboratory on our next blog.