Planet Murple inspires kids to explore natural food through creative cooking and playful media. We help kids and their families build happy relationships to healthy food! Our world is based on a fantastical planet made entirely of natural food and follows the adventures of the Murples. Kids interact with the Murples through Storytime Recipes via streaming videos and books. These recipes are designed for kids 4-8 to make with their guardians as an afterschool or weekend activity, and are always made with natural food. We are also building a line of Murple-branded children culinary products that make it both easy and irresistibly fun to bring kids into the kitchen. With Planet Murple, we make learning to cook real food an experience to look forward to!
Awards: 2nd Place
Accelerating Low-to-Moderate Income Customer Inclusion in Community Solar
Solar is booming and the price is lower than ever. Yet, 80% of America is locked out of the rooftop solar market. Solstice radically expands access to clean energy by providing community-shared solar power to underserved American households. This model enables any resident to enjoy clean energy at no upfront cost and save money on their electric bill every year. Our project will put affordable solar in the hands of low- to moderate-income Americans by offering the country’s first short-term community solar contract, by working with trusted community organizations to enroll social networks together and by qualifying customers using metrics other than FICO credit scores (unprecedented in the industry).
MakeGlow
The majority of low-income rural Indian communities still use kerosene for lighting purposes and haven’t made the switch to solar technology because of a high initial investment involved and lack of awareness. MakeGlow is a low-cost Do-It-Yourself solar lantern that addresses both these problems. MakeGlow is mainly intended for students from underserved schools in low-income rural Indian communities. As part of a MakeGlow learning activity integrated in the school curriculum, students will build their own MakeGlow solar lanterns out of cardboard and a kit of parts. This approach will teach students about the working and benefits of switching to solar, while providing them with the means to build a low-cost solar lantern. At the end of the class term, students will organize a sale where they’d sell their MakeGlows to people in their communities, at a very low cost. This also acts as an effective channel of distribution for solar.
Chords for Progression
“There is geometry in the humming of the strings, there is music in the spacing of the spheres.” Pythagoras appreciated these hidden potentials. Thinking in mathematical and musical concepts opens up a new understanding of the world. For adolescent Students with Limited or Interrupted Formal Education (SLIFE) coming from countries where poverty, disaster, civil unrest, persecution, or gender restrictions have affected their development of literacy and opportunities for education, the need to access this understanding is especially critical. This Big Idea is an after-school program for Oakland high school refugee/asylum-seeking immigrants that fuses math with musicianship to facilitate language learning. Music increases both the surface area and volume of the brain and promotes emotional healing; basic math is essential to academics and daily living; English is necessary for schooling. This project offers an accelerated learning capability—let’s unlock their hidden potentials and see them thrive in their new home.
Feces to Fuel
Feces to Fuel is pioneering a project that unlocks the potential of human feces and other waste streams by transforming them into an affordable household cooking fuel. Sanivation provides in- home toilets to low-income households and a service to collect and treat human waste. The project aims to create charcoal briquettes from human and agricultural waste. These briquettes can be sold for less than conventional charcoal and produce less smoke than traditional household cooking fuels. This in turn reduces the users’ exposure to toxic fumes and indoor air pollution. Simultaneously, the briquettes have a lower carbon impact than traditional fuel. They offer a renewable energy source that reduces greenhouse gas emissions and deforestation by the charcoal industry. Additionally, these briquettes have the potential to be successful in the market and provide revenue needed to complete Sanivation’s waste reuse business model.
Wildfire
When breaking news happens around you, how do you hear about it? Whether it’s a mugging, fire, or shooting nearby, there aren’t effective ways of notifying the immediate community in real time. Wildfire sends real-time notifications to your phone when a user reports dangerous activity nearby. With Wildfire, breaking local news is delivered to you, and you don’t even have to unlock your phone. Getting informed on Wildfire is not about who your friends are or who you follow, rather notifications are sourced from people nearby. If an emergency occurs, users can write an alert that is sent directly to their emergency contacts, their nearby community, and a dashboard monitored by public safety officials—all with one button. A user’s emergency contacts do not even have to download the app to receive their alert via SMS. Before walking home, users can also view recent incidents in their area.
Campus Cooks
In 2014, one in four students said they had to “skip meals in order to save money.” Campus Cooks (CC) seeks to provide students with resources to help alleviate hunger and food insecurity. These two issues contribute to the deterioration of physical and mental health, increased stress, and hindered academic success. The Campus Cooks application includes cooking recipes with concise and informative text, appealing photos, and engaging videos. CC includes a breakdown of the cost of ingredients for recipes as well as nutrient information for the complete dishes. Food assistance programs are detailed on the app in an effort to make students aware of food pantries, urban farms, and other programs that can provide immediate relief. Whether a student is the next Rachael Ray or cannot crack an egg, Campus Cooks consolidates the resources necessary to mitigate one of the most pressing issues for students.
FloGlow: Low Cost Spirometer
Developing countries have a dire need for measuring the respiratory health of patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and asthma. Spirometry is the gold standard in developed countries for diagnosing respiratory illnesses. However, spirometers are costly and require a reliable power supply, regular maintenance, and a computer for operation. All of these requirements are unmet by the environment of most developing countries. Project FloGlow: A Low-Cost Spirometer addresses this need by developing a spirometer specifically for low-resource clinics and solving key problems existing spirometers fail to address. FloGlow operates without the aid of a PC or smartphone, possesses on-board data storage and display, and allows simple and accurate calibration—all for less than $35. This device has the potential to reduce misdiagnosed cases and provides clinicians the ability to improve management of both the symptoms and the disease to reduce preventable morbidity and mortality.
VIRA: A Low-Cost HIV Viral Load Quantification System
Viral load testing is increasingly supported as a necessary component of the HIV management cycle. Regular monitoring for treatment failure by a viral load test is endorsed by the World Health Organization as essential to a globally sustainable treatment plan. Tijuana has been identified as the potential site of an HIV epidemic due to both its rising incidence of HIV cases and to its disproportionately large populations of high-risk sex workers and intravenous drug users. A novel detection system called VIRA has been developed to make the viral load test financially and logistically feasible for Tijuana health clinics to incorporate into their treatment and containment strategies. VIRA combines a low-cost centrifuge, automated RNA extraction device, paper-based genetic circuit, and smartphone-based photometric quantification system to yield a fast, easy, and inexpensive point-of- care viral load test which may be implemented in Tijuana and readily adapted to other low-resource settings.