Vision 2030 is Kenya’s national planning strategy for “becoming a middle-income country by 2030.” Despite economic advancements, roughly 17 million of Kenya’s 41 million people lack sufficient access to safe drinking water, and 28 million are without adequate sanitation. Maji Huja Kwanza (Water Comes First in Kiswahili) aims to bring lasting inclusiveness, representation, and opportunity to the people of the coastal province of Kenya. The project aims to bring piped water and sewage access to public primary schools in the coast, beginning in Kaloleni with Kizurini Primary and Twinkle Star Primary, serving roughly 1000 children. The goal is to improve WASH (water, sanitation and hygiene) practices in the coast and enable children, particularly girls, to participate in school successfully and to avoid unnecessary illness such as cholera and typhoid. Long-term plans include a technical training program for plumbing and maintenance skills, and expansion to serve orphans’ homes, adult schools, and private homes. This will contribute to sustainable growth and the livelihood of this region.
The project’s goal is to create a collaborative platform to promote open data literacy. This platform will provide a curriculum that is focused on making open data more accessible and usable to students, policymakers, civil society organizations, journalists, and researchers. The team will distribute these materials to a network of partners who already have boots on the ground, who can teach the material while also implementing their own mapping projects, and who have a focus on development and developing countries. In addition, the curriculum will be hosted on an interactive online platform offering content, data, tools, and learning materials for public access. A goal of the project is to increase the availability of this data on mobile devices, since their far exceeds that of personal computers in developing countries.
Speech therapy is not fun for children. It consists of frequent doctor visits and boring repetitive homework. Outside of the office, the therapist has no idea if the child performs the exercises correctly or at all. Modern speech recognition is capable of accurately detecting speech impediments, and the speed of current mobile devices makes it possible to use this in a game that reacts and responds to speech in real time. A tool like this on a mobile device will motivate children to practice their therapy exercises while also providing critical feedback and information to the therapist about how the child progresses outside of the office. This tool enables speech therapists to continue aiding children remotely, providing better care and enabling organizations to make an even bigger impact in a child’s life.
Wildfires are a major part of California’s ecology and take a large amount of resources to monitor, contain, and ultimately suppress. Cal Fire is the state entity that is responsible for suppressing wildfires in California. Operations help improve the ecology of the local habitats by protecting rare and/or unique ecological resources, as well as protecting human property. Air-fighting resources such as fixed and rotary winged aircrafts are often used in fire suppression efforts. However, these tools are expensive to utilize and sometimes pose safety concerns such as pilot fatigue and low visibility flight. The goal of this proposal is to reduce the use of full-scaled crew-carrying aircraft by using small Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) in fire monitoring operations. Their project will create an UAV that could provide 24-hour monitoring to reduce the cost and increase the safety of wildfire monitoring. This would allow for traditional aircrafts that monitor fires to be used for different missions (e.g. water drops, short hauls, or resupply).
Traditional central heating and cooling systems treat an entire house as if it were one room with one uniform temperature. Furthermore, these systems fail to provide room-specific temperature control, instead heating or cooling the entire home based on the readings of a single temperature sensor in the thermostat. By installing a wirelessly controlled vent cover, equipped with temperature sensor and motorized shutter in each room of a house, the Wallflower Ventilation system provides the ability to control room-specific temperature settings. Each vent will communicate with a central thermostat that controls and monitors the network. The thermostat will also record temperature readings to the homeowner’s online account. By accessing the system’s website, the user can update their desired temperature, change settings from their smartphone or office computer, and track their home’s energy use. With this system, the home’s ventilation network can become part of the Internet of Things, offering real-time monitoring, access to weather forecasts, and the incorporation of advanced analytics.
India Smiles is a 3-year project aimed at alleviating childhood malnutrition and poor oral health outcomes caused by the transition from traditional agricultural-based diets to processed snack and “junk foods” in India. Through an effective entrepreneurial and social marketing model for community-based distribution of oral health care products and services by local community health workers, India Smiles works towards improving oral health in children ages up to age six. The project will employ oral hygiene education, application of fluoride varnish, preventative oral health care, dental examination, and distribution of toothbrushes, toothpaste and dental assistance to provide not only health benefits for mothers and children, but also financial benefits for the entrepreneurial health workers fostering a system of community involvement and sustainability.
Cash FLOW aims to address the problem of low financial literacy by bringing personal finance classes to high schools. Through these classes, high school students will be equipped with the knowledge and skills to make informed financial decisions during and after college. Currently, the team leads a weekly “Teaching Financial Literacy” DeCal course that teaches students about personal finance and guides them to apply their knowledge by counseling low-income individuals at homeless shelters. By using the student-to-student teaching model, instructors hone their leadership skills, solidify their knowledge base, and create a platform for open discussion with students. Leading an after-school program in high schools, starting with the pilot program at El Cerrito High during the 2013-2014 school year, the team intends to use their democratic teaching model to provide high school students with the key money management skills that they will need to succeed in their post-high school lives. The curriculum includes loans, budgeting, banking services, financial aid, and other financial information that may impact their lives.
This proposal’s plan is to develop a computer program that can be used to practice electron-pushing mechanisms in organic chemistry. Students struggle significantly in electron-arrow pushing mechanisms, a critical part of an organic chemistry course’s grade. By implementing this project, Push Me, Pull You hopes to increase students’ understanding of this phenomenon in organic chemistry, and therefore further students’ overall understanding of the subject. The application for this computer program will include a tutoring and a solving level. With this new program, Push Me, Pull You, will help students to better understand organic chemistry, and take away the unnecessary fear that strikes new organic chemistry students.
Vision from the Bottom aims to bypass the costs of customized eyeglasses and vision screening by implementing a social business model and supply chain network to deliver easy, inexpensive and effective vision correction to people in Cambodia. Using recent innovations in self-refraction technology for vision screening and standardized eyeglass products for vision correction, Vision from the Bottom will provide job training for vision vendors—a door-to-door community-based sales force for self-adjustable glasses. Vision vendors will also provide a basic eye-disease detection test and can consult and coordinate visits to eye clinics or hospitals for patients who need further care. Vision from the Bottom will apply an incentive-based, scale-up supply chain so vision vendors who achieve higher sales are provided with more discounts when acquiring these self-adjustable glasses for the purposes of selling them to customers, and they will also be promoted to a higher position.
