Planet X-Women - Space Apps Challenge

Planet X-Women| Better Together

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.

Project Insight Inequality

Summary

NASA has been researching the mental health & well being of their astronauts for years. Project-X Women proposes an online platform available to all students that encourage discussions of all different cultures and backgrounds, as well as provides a safe space for students to grasp the topic of mental health and awareness. With the conversations of inequality and mental health growing more and more every day, it is time for these conversations to morph into teachings.

How We Addressed This Challenge

We developed an online learning education resource centered around providing young students an education about mental health, and minorities. We believe it's important to bring about change and fuel conversations about the ways we have created stigma around mental health, and societal differences. It is based on a module based method of tailored education, that thrives on active conversations. We hope to achieve a new level of education, that would allow the next generation to have a more acceptive, open and honest society. That not only understand bias, systematic mistreatment, and other great issues, but also understand the importance of talking about them. One that is brave enough to ask for help, to call out unacceptable laws, differences, and issues.

How We Developed This Project

We were inspired, as we are all a minority within a given field. Our team is composed of women, who are studying in STEM (mainly engineering), with a love for aerospace. All of our members have different backgrounds, issues, and are often part of other small minorities.

Our approach was one based on listening t each other, our stories, and experiences. From there we proceeded to use the available NASA resources, combined with our stories, to develop something that has the power of bringing about difference, and change. We focused our ideas on the basis of details, rather than rushing to create an app, or website from it. In our view, these are far more important, than to be mistreated. So rather, we focused on research, and tailoring our idea of details, of how this education tool should be built, including the different sub tools, resources it should offer.

We faced issues of overstepping in some cases, as even for us, talking about mental health, and our hardships was challenging, as we still live in a world of stigma around it. Therefore, we used the approach of patience, and listening, being open, and forgiving. WE are very proud of the ideas, and the detailed educational plan that we have crafted.

How We Used Space Agency Data in This Project

We used NASA data and resources centered around treating inequality, and building conversations. As well as how our entire project rooted from research done is space, about mental health. How the mental health of astronauts can be affected by stress, workload, etc. We understand that children of minorities, face many everyday hardships, that increase their potential risk to stress, and workload challenges.