STEM-In-Action Spring Scoop: Shanti
Our STEM-In-Action Grant winning teams have been hard at work for the past year advancing their eCYBERMISSION 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 process. Today, we're catching up with team Shanti.
Hi! We are Team Shanti from Naperville, Illinois. Our team consists of three 8th grade girls, Naisha Hamirwasia, Leya Nair, and Nitya Jayasankar. One of the key moments during our journey to make this mission come to life was realizing that this problem exists within our own community. While we were aware of the widespread issue of mental health globally, we never truly recognized its presence among us. As we dug deeper into our research, we began to notice signs of these struggles all around us, even among our friends who appeared to have everything together on the surface. This realization sparked our determination to address these issues head-on.
The Shanti Club
We have been running the Shanti Club since the beginning of the 2023-2024 school year and it has been flourishing! Our aim for the Shanti Club is to guide students as they discover themselves and help them regulate their emotions as they go through life. We have monthly meetings where we focus on different topics that students might be struggling with.
Most recently, we had guest speaker Stacy Montgomery run an “Owning Your Power” workshop to help students build self-esteem. The workshop was a hit among students, and we engaged in fun activities encouraging self-love. Each student received a jar which they decorated with positive messages and images. Students were told to write down something good that happened to them at regular intervals and put it into the jar. The goal of this activity is to help students identify the good in themselves and in their lives. In our January club meeting, we had students take the Myers-Briggs personality test and compare the different personality types of their peers. This helped students with their identity and helped them learn more about their peers. In December, we made self-care goody bags for kids at the 360 Youth housing center. Many students had fun and were engaged while packing the bags, putting all of their effort into each one.
To raise awareness about anxiety and stress, we teach students different techniques to battle such emotions. Some techniques we've taught include journaling, meditation, and replacing negative thoughts with positive ones. Anxiety and stress are common emotions that students experience, and they can impact students’ lives in huge ways. The Shanti Club aims to help students recognize and fight such uncomfortable emotions to better equip them for their futures!
The Shanti App
Our club has emotionally benefitted many students in our school; now, we want to take our mission one step forward.
We are adding a new focus, a mobile app. We recognized that technology has a huge impact on teens and tweens, so we decided to leverage this to our advantage.
We have gained publicity from various organizations through our club. For one of our club meetings, a representative from KidsMatter spread awareness about anxiety and depression to attendees at our club. 360 Youth appreciated the self-care baskets we made for the kids in their housing center in December. In addition, the local Naperville organization, NCTV17, posted an article about our project. You can find the article here. In September, our school health teacher posted a TikTok about our efforts to spread awareness about suicide for Suicide Awareness Week. We have future plans to contact our local mayor since his platform is mental health to gain more participants for our app study.
We are eagerly waiting to see our app on the app store and benefitting all users emotionally and socially. We are also looking forward to including all of our ideas on this app. And, as always, we are ready to spread our mission and make an impact in our community.
_______________________________________
Mental health is an invisible force that affects us all, yet we keep it hidden, afraid to show any vulnerability. As a result, it creates the illusion that we are all alone. More than 7 in 10 teenagers aged 13-19 actively struggle with mental health. This startling information was collected from a survey conducted by the National 4-H Council. This is why we have made it our mission to help middle and high school students feel more confident and connected by enhancing their social and emotional well-being.
Mental health is an invisible force that affects us all, yet we keep it hidden, afraid to show any vulnerability. As a result, it creates the illusion that we are all alone. More than 7 in 10 teenagers aged 13-19 actively struggle with mental health. This startling information was collected from a survey conducted by the National 4-H Council. This is why we have made it our mission to help middle and high school students feel more confident and connected by enhancing their social and emotional well-being.
.HEIC) |
| Team Shanti |
Hi! We are Team Shanti from Naperville, Illinois. Our team consists of three 8th grade girls, Naisha Hamirwasia, Leya Nair, and Nitya Jayasankar. One of the key moments during our journey to make this mission come to life was realizing that this problem exists within our own community. While we were aware of the widespread issue of mental health globally, we never truly recognized its presence among us. As we dug deeper into our research, we began to notice signs of these struggles all around us, even among our friends who appeared to have everything together on the surface. This realization sparked our determination to address these issues head-on.
The Shanti Club
We have been running the Shanti Club since the beginning of the 2023-2024 school year and it has been flourishing! Our aim for the Shanti Club is to guide students as they discover themselves and help them regulate their emotions as they go through life. We have monthly meetings where we focus on different topics that students might be struggling with.
 |
| February Shanti Club Meeting |
Most recently, we had guest speaker Stacy Montgomery run an “Owning Your Power” workshop to help students build self-esteem. The workshop was a hit among students, and we engaged in fun activities encouraging self-love. Each student received a jar which they decorated with positive messages and images. Students were told to write down something good that happened to them at regular intervals and put it into the jar. The goal of this activity is to help students identify the good in themselves and in their lives. In our January club meeting, we had students take the Myers-Briggs personality test and compare the different personality types of their peers. This helped students with their identity and helped them learn more about their peers. In December, we made self-care goody bags for kids at the 360 Youth housing center. Many students had fun and were engaged while packing the bags, putting all of their effort into each one.
To raise awareness about anxiety and stress, we teach students different techniques to battle such emotions. Some techniques we've taught include journaling, meditation, and replacing negative thoughts with positive ones. Anxiety and stress are common emotions that students experience, and they can impact students’ lives in huge ways. The Shanti Club aims to help students recognize and fight such uncomfortable emotions to better equip them for their futures!
The Shanti App
Our club has emotionally benefitted many students in our school; now, we want to take our mission one step forward.
We are adding a new focus, a mobile app. We recognized that technology has a huge impact on teens and tweens, so we decided to leverage this to our advantage.
Through our research, we discovered that lack of self-awareness causes teenagers to get stuck in a loop of negative emotions. We decided to build a mobile app that will give users the opportunity to track their mood along with tips on how to improve it. Our app will also give them the chance to see how their mood has been over the last week and month. Our hypothesis is that with these features, users will be able to take control of their emotions and improve their overall wellbeing.
Currently, we are working to build an app that will be available on the app store. Our initial draft of the app, or minimum viable product (MVP), will include a mood tracker, a notification system, personal statistics, and daily affirmations. Since building an app is a long process, we are simultaneously working with the IT development team from the Mars Corporation to build a web app, which is a simplified version of a mobile app. This will be our model for our proof of concept (POC). A POC is an experiment to see whether our idea will work and what changes we can make to improve the benefits for our users. Moving forward, we hope to add multiple new features, namely badges, a journal, daily challenges, and an AI friend. We hope to have our app available to the public by June in its MVP state and slowly add more features to enhance the app’s benefits.
The Shanti App Study
To make sure our app is helpful to teenagers, we want to put our POC through a three-week-long study. In this study, an experimental group will use all features of our app and report back to us about (a) whether the app helped them or not and (b) whether they feel more self-aware about their emotions. A control group will not use our app and its features regularly, and they will also report back to us about how self-aware they are about their emotions. With this information, we can compare the responses and figure out how helpful our app is to users. Our goal for this study is to complete it by mid-April successfully with useful data points. In the future, we’d like to use this study as a reference when adding features to our app.
Like any good project, we have faced numerous setbacks. Our biggest one was deciding what feature would be part of our MVP. We had so many ideas, and each idea brought new benefits for our users. The three of us had many discussions covering this topic. In the end, we used a very common method in the business industry called “storyboarding”. Storyboarding is a visual representation of how a plan plays out. We wrote down our mission and goals for our app along with all of our ideas. This helped us finalize our MVP and our objectives for the app.
Currently, we are working to build an app that will be available on the app store. Our initial draft of the app, or minimum viable product (MVP), will include a mood tracker, a notification system, personal statistics, and daily affirmations. Since building an app is a long process, we are simultaneously working with the IT development team from the Mars Corporation to build a web app, which is a simplified version of a mobile app. This will be our model for our proof of concept (POC). A POC is an experiment to see whether our idea will work and what changes we can make to improve the benefits for our users. Moving forward, we hope to add multiple new features, namely badges, a journal, daily challenges, and an AI friend. We hope to have our app available to the public by June in its MVP state and slowly add more features to enhance the app’s benefits.
The Shanti App Study
To make sure our app is helpful to teenagers, we want to put our POC through a three-week-long study. In this study, an experimental group will use all features of our app and report back to us about (a) whether the app helped them or not and (b) whether they feel more self-aware about their emotions. A control group will not use our app and its features regularly, and they will also report back to us about how self-aware they are about their emotions. With this information, we can compare the responses and figure out how helpful our app is to users. Our goal for this study is to complete it by mid-April successfully with useful data points. In the future, we’d like to use this study as a reference when adding features to our app.
Like any good project, we have faced numerous setbacks. Our biggest one was deciding what feature would be part of our MVP. We had so many ideas, and each idea brought new benefits for our users. The three of us had many discussions covering this topic. In the end, we used a very common method in the business industry called “storyboarding”. Storyboarding is a visual representation of how a plan plays out. We wrote down our mission and goals for our app along with all of our ideas. This helped us finalize our MVP and our objectives for the app.
 |
| Storyboarding for the Shanti app |
We have gained publicity from various organizations through our club. For one of our club meetings, a representative from KidsMatter spread awareness about anxiety and depression to attendees at our club. 360 Youth appreciated the self-care baskets we made for the kids in their housing center in December. In addition, the local Naperville organization, NCTV17, posted an article about our project. You can find the article here. In September, our school health teacher posted a TikTok about our efforts to spread awareness about suicide for Suicide Awareness Week. We have future plans to contact our local mayor since his platform is mental health to gain more participants for our app study.
We are eagerly waiting to see our app on the app store and benefitting all users emotionally and socially. We are also looking forward to including all of our ideas on this app. And, as always, we are ready to spread our mission and make an impact in our community.
_______________________________________
We are so impressed by the way that Shanti has continued to progress their project through their STEM-In-Action Grant, and so proud of the positive impact they are having on their school and community. We're looking forward to seeing their Shanti app once it's finished!
Join us next week as we hear from the next STEM-In-Action Grant winners. Projects can begin now for the 2024-2025 eCYBERMISSION competition, and the eCYBERMISSION Mini-Grant application is now open for teachers.
Faith Benner
Senior Communications and Marketing Specialist
Comments
Post a Comment
We welcome your comments and expect that our conversation will follow the general rules of respectful civil discourse. This is a moderated blog, and we will only post comments from bloggers over 13 years of age that relate to eCYBERMISSION. We will review comments for posting within one business day. Bloggers are fully responsible for everything that they submit in their comments, and all posted comments are in the public domain. We do not discriminate against any views, but we reserve the right not to post comments.