STEM-In-Action Spring Scoop: Myco-Risers
eCYBERMISSION STEM-In-Action Grant winning teams have been hard at work for the past year advancing their projects to make a difference in their communities. If you're new to the eCYBERMISSION blog, the Army Educational Outreach Program (AEOP) awards STEM-In-Action Grants of up to $5,000 to eCYBERMISSION teams that wish to further develop and implement their projects in their communities. We're checking back in with this year's STEM-In-Action Grant teams to get the inside scoop on their project progress. For our fourth blog, we're catching up with team Myco-Risers.
YUVAAN:
Yuvaan's About Us page:
We are Aditya, Graham, and Yuvaan. Aditya likes to play on his Xbox and likes to play chess. Graham likes to play soccer and board games such as monopoly. Yuvaan likes to play chess and basketball. In common, we all love science. We are the Myco-Risers. Our team researched on a project and submitted it in the eCYBERMISSION competition. In the competition, we passed through both states and regionals and competed in nationals. We each got a 4,000 dollar government bond and 5,000 dollars to implement our project in the real world. From there, we took a step forward and are trying to spread our work even further. We believe that we need to help the environment. This drove us to do our project.
Graham's About Us page:
Our team consists of 3 team members: me, Aditya, Yuvaan, and of course our coach, Murali. Our team as a whole has always loved science and working as a team. The name of our team is the Myco-Risers. Beginning the project, we searched for ideas until we found that Yuvaan's vegetable garden was not doing so well. This is when we decided on finding a way to fix this issue, quickly we began researching. Our project went through states and regionals, next we competed in nationals. Although we did not win the competition, we received 4,000 dollars each as a saving bond. Our team thinks our project could have a major impact on the environment.
What pros! Team Myco-Risers are doing an awesome job staying organized and thinking long-term about how best to continue their project. The Myco-Risers are rising indeed!
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One of our goals for the project is to bring awareness to our findings about harmful grass lawns and their alternatives. We are building a website where we will provide all the information related to this. We will also be posting updates of our progress on the site. Our goal for the website is for it to become a one stop shop with required information for people to check out and change their lawn to other native plants.
Class 1
In class one, we discussed mainly deciding on the content of the website and what tool sets we will use to build it. We narrowed our options to google sites, and html. We decided on google sites because it will be easy to build and maintain it. We are also familiar with it. For our homework that day, we listed at least ten things to add in the google site. Here was our homeworks:YUVAAN:
- About us page
- Show the problems with grass lawns
- How the grass impacts the environment
- How the problems relate to the people
- How clover can fix those problems
- How clover can benefit the environment
- Our experiment
- A step by step tutorial on how to change your lawn
- A google form
- This contains your address (so we can send the seeds)
- How much lawn you are changing to clover?
- Do you want a sign, if so what do you want it to say?
- About us
- Why we chose this project
- History of grass lawns
- Testing/Experiment
- Effects of grass lawns
- Positives of planting clover
- Links page (social media, google form, ect
- eCYBERMISSION National Judging & Educational Event
- Our goal
- Contact Information
- About Us Page
- What we plan to achieve
- What we already did
- How you can help
- Experts to reach out to
- Our Mission Folder
- Our Stem-In-Action Grant Proposal
- Why grass has negative impacts on the environment
- Why clover has very positive impacts on the environment
- What our experiment is
- Social media links
Class 2
In class 2, we focused on the About Us page. Since this was at the top of all the lists, we knew it would be included in the site. That day, we researched how different sites implemented the About Us page. We looked closely at traits they all had in common. Then, we looked at the ones that really stood out and identified their traits. The traits we found were general description and a hook story. The homework we had was to research more and craft our own About Us pages.Yuvaan's About Us page:
We are Aditya, Graham, and Yuvaan. Aditya likes to play on his Xbox and likes to play chess. Graham likes to play soccer and board games such as monopoly. Yuvaan likes to play chess and basketball. In common, we all love science. We are the Myco-Risers. Our team researched on a project and submitted it in the eCYBERMISSION competition. In the competition, we passed through both states and regionals and competed in nationals. We each got a 4,000 dollar government bond and 5,000 dollars to implement our project in the real world. From there, we took a step forward and are trying to spread our work even further. We believe that we need to help the environment. This drove us to do our project.
Graham's About Us page:
Our team consists of 3 team members: me, Aditya, Yuvaan, and of course our coach, Murali. Our team as a whole has always loved science and working as a team. The name of our team is the Myco-Risers. Beginning the project, we searched for ideas until we found that Yuvaan's vegetable garden was not doing so well. This is when we decided on finding a way to fix this issue, quickly we began researching. Our project went through states and regionals, next we competed in nationals. Although we did not win the competition, we received 4,000 dollars each as a saving bond. Our team thinks our project could have a major impact on the environment.
Class 3
We did a lot in class three. In class three, we went over and finalized the plan for the website. We finished figuring out what the first four pages are going to be. We reviewed and checked what we all had in common and put it in the final checklist. We looked at the things we did not have in common and discussed why or why they should not be in the site. We also discussed the orientation and where each page should go. We had a lot of disagreements on this one, but we worked it out and came to an agreement. We also worked on rebranding our logo. The original was black and white. We were wondering if we should change it to a more colorful logo. There are both pros and cons to this idea. These are the different pros and cons we discussed:
We made different designs on Photopea.com to see which looked better. We do not have an answer yet, but we will soon. Here are the options:
Lawn change
We are still working on the changing of the lawn. We needed to take new samples because the old samples were too old. We first went to our friend's place to take samples. We have a new method of sampling that we did not use earlier. We are now using a system where you use a shovel and dig two streaks in the ground. Then, we pull out the chunk that the two streaks made. With those, we will cut a rectangular piece from two and six inches below the surface. After that, we put it in a bucket, mix it around, and go to the next spot.
We are sampling six to ten different spots around the area depending on the size. The different spots are in the shape of an “V” if it is six spots, and “M” if it is ten spots. It would look like this:
After we finished at our friend’s place, we went to Fox Lake to take more tests there. We are planning to add clover there as well. We worked on the field and got our samples to send to Cornell University. After that, we will be taking the samples at our own homes.
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What pros! Team Myco-Risers are doing an awesome job staying organized and thinking long-term about how best to continue their project. The Myco-Risers are rising indeed!
Faith Benner
Sr. Communications and Marketing Specialist
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