JAWAS - Space Apps Challenge

JAWAS| Better Together

Awards & Nominations

JAWAS has received the following awards and nominations. Way to go!

Global Nominee

Better Together

Your challenge is to create a tool, app, or resource that helps close a gap that causes people to experience inequality. This combination of humanity and technology should eliminate or lessen a systemic issue and educate the user so they can grow.

Debunking the Model Minority Myth

Summary

At first glance, Asian-American Pacific Islanders (AAPI) seem to have it real good. They are at the top of their class, financially successful, and dominate top positions in the workplace...or do they?The Model Minority Myth (MMM) is notorious for reducing the AAPI community to a monolith under the guise of praise. The result puts thousands of underrepresented ethnic groups at a serious disadvantage in their education, careers, and financial literacy — areas where AAPI supposedly excel.In this project, JAWAS illustrates the falsehoods and negative impact of the MMM via data graphics and personal testimonials.

How We Addressed This Challenge

We highlighted the four main pillars upon which MMM stands on to reveal that the claim relies heavily on aggregated data. The AAPI is not made up of a homogenous group of people, and so the data used to make informed decisions that affect the AAPI community shouldn’t treat them as such. We emphasize the number of ethnic groups within the AAPI community who do not live up to the MMM standards and how the myth has hurt those groups for generations.

Furthermore, we acknowledged that not all forms of racism can be described with data, so we include testimonials from members of the AAPI community that describe their experience with the MMM.

How We Developed This Project

Why the Model Minority Myth?

When we read the Better Together prompt, we loved how it aligned with current social justice news and events. For us, erasing inequality wasn’t just in the mainstream news cycle, but also in our social media feeds and our daily thoughts.

We discussed possible topics and had a heart-to-heart about some inequalities that we’ve personally faced. When we discussed MMM, it was immediately obvious that we had a lot to say about it. The whole team already understood this about each other and it was a topic we were able to relate to and be passionate about.

During the process of creating this project, we definitely learned some things about Asian American history that were not taught in school. While searching for data and statistics, we also found that we were not able to give an accurate comparison of some statistics because of the very problem we exposed - lack of disaggregated data.

Team roles & tools

Technologies used: NodeJs, ReactJs, Flourish, Material UI, Figma

Each member of our team specializes in a certain area of tech, which is how we divvied up the tasks. Will focused on the app development and started off with a create React app boilerplate template, which he then added on to using HTML/CSS. Albert used Flourish to visualize the information that he parsed from existing data sets. JoJo created the app’s wireframes and applied branding styles used in the final app design. Sukanya and Annvie handled the bulk of the research and wrote all of the content displayed in the app.

How We Used Space Agency Data in This Project

Data from the American Community Survey PUMS is used as an exhaustive source of information deriving specific life styles, educational decisions, and detailed demographics on a sampling of 1% of the population. The data was aggregated in python to highlight factors such as wealth, occupation, and education levels of different ethnicities and specifically detailed breakdowns across various ethnic asian groups. Data was visualized with Flourished and Datawrapper after preprocessing and aggregating. With the lack of data available with detailed breakdown of demographics, the PUMS was essential in providing a consistent and comparable base across multiple variables.