To spread information on MRSA, we have created an outreach program in which we visit various areas of our community, educating residents and visitors on the infection.

Educating Lower School Students

On Friday, February 1st, two of our team members took a shuttle to the kindergarten - 5th grade campus of our school to interview a random selection of students about MRSA. Younger kids do not need to know as much detail about the infection, especially kindergarteners, but they still need to realize that practicing good hygiene will keep them healthy. Out of 10 students (5 girls and 5 boys, 4th grade) that we asked about MRSA, only two knew what we were talking about. We asked 4th graders because on Thursday, February 7 th, our whole team made a presentation to 4th grade science classes , and especially stressed the importance of hand washing and hygiene as the easiest way to prevent MRSA. Also, we posted flyers about the importance of hand-washing around the lower school campus (especially in the kindergarten – second grade areas). These flyers are simpler than ones we posted at the middle school just for the purpose of getting a straightforward message across. Afterschool, we randomly interviewed 10 students from the classes (5 girls and 5 boys again) and, this time, nine out of ten were aware of the topic. We believe that the increase in awareness stimulated by our presentation will help protect lower school students from spreading and contracting the skin infection MRSA.

Pictures of us educating the students are available on our photo gallery.

Distribution Flyers

Our team used these three flyers as some of our main educational tools. All together, we have posted over 150 flyers in schools, local gyms, a library, and supermarkets.
-Flyer 1
-Flyer 2
-Flyer 3

The first flyer was the main one. Over fifty of these fliers were posted over our schools in places frequently visited by both students and teacher, such as the bathrooms, cafeteria, and hallways. The purpose of the flier was to further educate the members of our community on the prevention and treatment of MRSA, direct them to our website, mrsainfo.net, and tell them to send their MRSA-related questions to our email at mrsainfo@gmail.com.

The second flyer is a flyer that we posted around the lower school campus, especially in kindergarten - 2nd grade areas. It is simpler than the one we posted in middle school for the purpose of getting our message about hygiene across without being intimidating to younger children.

The third flyer was created to remind people to wash their hands, therefore reducing the spread of MRSA. We decided this was important because our experiments showed that in our school people were not washing their hands enough. We therefore placed twenty of these fliers over sinks in every bathroom of our school.

Presentation at the Harker Science Symposium

Our team will participate in the Harker Science and Research Symposium in March. This program has been instituted only a few years ago, but it has already become famous throughout the world. Many of the world’s leading researchers and scientists attend this event that is sponsored by Intel and Google. Our team has been honored to not only attend these presentations but also to actually make a presentation in March. Since this event gains quite a bit of publicity in the Bay Area, our team feels that this presentation might be one of our most important outreach programs. For our presentation, we plan to have various handouts, a powerpoint, and a poster board. Our board will have information about our experimental process and our team’s efforts around our community. To be able to participate, we had to create an abstract for our project. The process of choosing the presentations at the symposium is competitive and our team of four people has been chosen. Since Daniela and Kaitlin will not be in town during this presentation, Katie and Ramya will be the two members of our team presenting.

Newsletter Article

Our team wrote a newsletter article that has been sent to various local newspapers such as the Evergreen Times, India Currents, the Almaden Times, and the San Jose Mercury News. It is designed to be a short summary of the basic information on MRSA, presented to the audience in a fun way. It contains an overview of the information on this website.

Community Bookmark and Brochure Distribution

We created a brochure that we have handed out to various members of our community, including students, people at senior centers, and members of gyms. It educates them on the basic facts of MRSA, how they can prevent themselves or their family from getting it, and what to do it they think that they have been infected by MRSA. Each folded brochure also contains a bookmark.

Neighborhood Information Distribution

On Saturday, February 2nd, all four of our team members met at one of our houses to distribute information packets in her neighborhood. We visited about 10 houses walking door-to-door with a parent, introducing ourselves as an eCybermission team doing a project on MRSA. We told people that we were giving out information to protect their families, and handed them a brochure, a bookmark, and a small bottle of hand sanitizer. On Sunday, February 17th, we also went door-to-door distributing these packages, this time visiting approximately 40 houses. Most people who listened to us did not appear to know what MRSA was, except for one doctor. We feel that we reached several families with important information that may have not reached them before in a way that was easy and quick to understand.

School Powerpoint Presentation

Our team prepared a PowerPoint presentation to present during an assembly period at our middle school, Harker. Other ecybermission teams also performed with us. This was an extremely important opportunity since it gave us our first example of how the community would react to our information. Before the presentation, we interviewed students on campus about MRSA, as well as our school nurse. We recorded these with a camcorder, and then placed these clips into our presentation in an attempt to capture the attention of the audience. This was highly successful, however, the students only remembered our videos, based on interviews and surveys several weeks later. Our PowerPoint, in addition to containing videos, contained basic information about the bacteria, a short backround of antibiotic resistance, and, most importantly, information on preventing the infection. We presented in front of an audience of approximately 500 sixth, seventh and eighth graders. Our presentation was approximately seven minutes long. To make sure the student body retained more information, we used many other educational tools which worked much better.

Vineland Library Presentation

Our team visited a local branch library to present on MRSA on Monday, February 10 th, 2008. First, we spoke to the librarians to get permission to distribute our fliers and bookmarks around the library. We received permission and distributed approximately 50 fliers in various locations around the library. We placed piles of our bookmarks and brochures around frequently visited locations in the library, and saw various people reading our educational materials. These tools helped us make a lasting impact on the library’s visitors. About fifteen minutes before our presentation, we distributed fliers to those entering the library, urging them to come to our presentation. In the community room, we presented to about 30 people. In addition to our presentation, two other teams presented their powerpoint presentations as well. We were congratulated by several audience members who felt that they had been well informed by our presentation when the presentations were over.

Distribution of Flyers Around the Community

The Funkadelic Four, our team, posted flyers on Sunday, February 14 around the San Jose Community at various stores. These stores included a local Costco, Staples, and Starbucks. Our flyers included valuable information on the prevention and symptoms of MRSA, and also told readers what to do if they thought that they had the deadly infection. We posted them in store bulletin boards and in prominent locations, and believe that the public will benefit from this information.

Documentary

Our team has just created a documentary describing the effects of MRSA and giving a fictional example of an MRSA contamination. This will soon be placed on our website and at www.youtube.com as well.