California 2026

PROJECT TITLE
Safe Space
A multilingual; crisis-response system for anonymous, real-time mental health intervention in our underserved School and Community of Mendota

PROJECT GOAL: Mendota High School students face a rising mental health crisis, including a 63.6% increase in suicidal ideation within one semester. Students in our rural Central Valley community have to endure limited mental health access, high counselor caseloads, cultural stigma, and language barriers. These leading factors prevent timely help-seeking during emotional crises. As a result, many students experience delayed or no intervention during critical moments, increasing isolation and risk while existing support systems remain underutilized.

We collaborated with Mendota High School’s National Alliance on Mental Illness club to evaluate mental health needs through anonymous surveys. Initial research found 55% of students reporting persistent hopelessness and 41% reporting suicidal ideation. We then distributed flyers across campus, collecting over 506+ responses. In this dataset, 65% reported thoughts of not wanting to be alive, and 44% experienced periods where they felt unable to continue.

We expanded our research into our community, yielding over 1,104+ responses. Within this expanded dataset, 44% reported times they wanted to give up, and 39% reported suicidal ideation. Additionally, 67% reported not using mental health apps, revealing an engagement gap. These findings led us to select students experiencing emotional distress who avoid traditional support as primary users. Findings were validated with our School Psychologist (Ms. Whittaker), Principal (Mr. Kirby), Superintendent (Dr. Lopez), MHS NAMI advisor (Mrs. Covarrubias), students, and our School Resource Officer.

PROJECT TITLE
Plant-Vitals
A Smart System for Novice Gardeners with Recommendations, Monitoring, and Maintenance

PROJECT GOAL: Our community lacks access to affordable local organic fruits and vegetables. As a result, people in our community attempt to start a garden in their homes and communities to improve their nutrition, mental and physical well-being, and to create a natural escape from their dense urban neighborhoods. Unfortunately, many people fail because they lack gardening knowledge. This leads to loss of money, time, and motivation.

Initially, we wanted to help our peers to raise an aesthetic and edible garden. We identified the community challenge by using Google forms to survey students in our school to find a problem they wished someone could solve. From our survey, we learned that 134 students in our community attempted to start a home garden, for food or greenery, but failed 72% of the time.

After surveying parents/guardians at an open house, we soon discovered they were also failing at a similar rate as children. 2025-2026 MESA USA National Engineering Design Competition Designing for Local Change

To understand why our users fail, we asked them: “What caused your plants to stop growing?” 34% said they didn’t water it enough, 36% blamed too much watering, and 30% were unsure about the cause.

Based on this information, we identified novice gardeners as our target audience who needed a tool to monitor their garden’s conditions.