Does yoga improve emotional regulation? Why don’t youth vote in elections? Can regular exercise combat anxiety and depression? How do we encourage girls to pursue careers in STEM fields? These are some of the questions explored by Bass Connections teams at Duke this year. After a year of hard work, several teams presented their answers in 5-minute flash talks at the EHDx event on April 9, and their audience was very impressed by their research.
Bass Connections is a program at Duke that allows students to engage with real world problems, and apply their classroom knowledge to solve problems in society. Accepted students spend a year or more working with an interdisciplinary team of faculty, undergraduates, and graduate students on a project within the five theme areas of Bass Connections: Brain & Society, Information, Society & Culture, Global Health, Education & Human Development, and Energy & Environment.
The eleven teams that presented at EHDx were part of the Education and Human Development theme, so they spent the year exploring questions related to advancing educational systems, or exploring other areas in support of positive life outcomes for youth. Each team selected representatives to speak for five minutes on the work they have accomplished this year, and the event became a competition when the moderators announced the audience would vote for the best talk at the end.
The winner of this competition was Bruny Kenou, presenting on behalf of the Virtual Avatar Coaches project. The goal of this team was to create a peer to peer coaching program to support college students struggling with mental health. This project aims to fight stigma with a platform that allows students to send an anonymous text and receive immediate help from a peer. Peer coaches will take a semester-long course to prepare for their role in the program, and the hope is for this to eventually improve the lives of many students suffering from a fear of stigmas and labels.
The talks were followed by a reception and poster session. The team that took the blue ribbon this time was Mindfulness in Human Development. The objective of this team is to improve the lives of middle school students in Durham with a yoga and mindfulness intervention during the school day. The team has found that taking a break for yoga in the middle of the day has had positive effects on empathy, emotional regulation, and body image on the young students. Did someone say namaste?
Honestly, I didn’t vote — I couldn’t pick a favorite! From designing a new and inclusive curriculum for elementary schools and helping kids learn computer science to investigating educational policy in Brazil and promoting awareness of female philosophers throughout history, each presentation was so impressive. It was easy to see that all of these teams have all been hard at work to affect positive change in society. If they can do this much in under a year, who knows what these talented undergraduates will accomplish in a lifetime!
