Barrett, The Honors College Thesis/Creative Project Collection

My research aims to determine the effectiveness of meditation and sleep applications (apps) on the reduction of anxiety and stress in college students, with a focus on sedative piano music. Results showed a significant reduction of stress and anxiety levels in college students when listening to sedative piano music versus non-sedative piano music. Music along with other therapy modalities in meditation and sleep apps show promise in reducing students’ anxiety and stress and promoting their successes.

This thesis aimed to create a curriculum for college students to increase their health insurance literacy and to evaluate the impact of the curriculum on participants' confidence. The curriculum for college students consisted of pre-recorded presentation slides covering six health insurance topics, pre- and post-tests, and evaluation questions. Canvas was used to house the curriculum. At the time of evaluation, a total of 12 participants had completed all aspects of the curriculum. The curriculum was evaluated through questions provided at the end of each module. It was found that participants felt the curriculum to be clear and helpful. Moreover, participants reported an increase in confidence, decreased confusion, and were interested in learning more about health insurance such as enrollment. Both the creation of a curriculum and the impact on participants' confidence was successful. At a later point in time, an analysis of the pre- and post-tests will be assessed to determine if the curriculum was effective at increasing health insurance literacy.

Living a healthy and balanced life can be difficult for college students at Arizona State University due to the barrier of high cost of healthy food. To understand more about this problem we conducted research on the Tempe campus through surveys and virtual focus groups. We discovered that the cost of healthy food is one of the main barriers preventing students from eating healthy. We also learned that the students would be more willing to eat healthier if they could access healthy foods at a more reasonable price. Our solution to this problem was Eunoia, a service that allows students to receive discounts on healthy food and incentivize them to eat healthier in the future. Our company creates an innovative relationship between our customers, their private health insurance companies and local grocery stores throughout the Phoenix Metro area. Students at Arizona State University will be able to purchase healthy food items discounted by up to 30%. These discounts will be funded by their health insurance companies as well as the local grocery stores they purchase from. Our business model allows our customers to live healthier lives while also providing value to partnered health insurance companies and grocery stores. Once we established our business model, we spoke with students at Arizona State University and representatives from health insurance companies. Through these demographics, we received positive feedback and early traction with our idea. Our goal is to be able to implement our product in the Arizona State University community and then expand this product into a more general market to help all people live a pure and balanced life.

Chameleons are notoriously a difficult species to provide proper husbandry for in captivity. They are an extremely intriguing species that has been gaining popularity among HERP enthusiasts, but the difficulty of care is deterring owners from these wonderful creatures. Building a proper enclosure takes a lot of time to plan and research. Then to gather all the different supplies and to build the enclosure takes even longer. New or inexperienced chameleon owners tend to build improper enclosures, and this can be detrimental to a chameleon's health. My small business provides an online service that allows a building experience custom to my clients’ new friend’s needs.

Our Founders Lab group created a pop-up thrift store on campus using donated clothing. We generated over $1000 in profits from our clothing sales to donate to a local charity, making our team the top-earning Founders Lab team. Our shop, Devils Rack, tabled twice on the Tempe ASU campus in order to generate our revenue.

Volunteers at Hand is an inclusive platform that focuses on creating an interconnected community of volunteers while providing an efficient and effective system that categorizes volunteer/service opportunities based on individual interests. The primary focus of our platform is to foster a compassionate community of individuals who will inspire each other as well as others, and provide hope through their contributions towards helping and healing people. The foundation of Volunteers at Hand will be established through development of an elaborate platform/website that would be equally and openly accessible to all individuals and organizations interested in contributing efforts towards volunteer/service experiences. The platform will implement a filtering system that would categorize service opportunities and events based on personal preferences and interests, thus enabling a more efficient and effective method of discovering various opportunities that an individual would be passionate in contributing their efforts towards. Our platform would also implement a community based aspect that fosters further communication and interactions amongst volunteers as well as organizations involved in volunteer/service experiences.