Dental Explorers / Exploradores Dentales

Tooth Invaders is an educational game app to promote the importance of oral health to young children in underserved communities and to increase access by connecting them to their local dentist.

I would like to address the disparities in oral health and lack of access to dental care in racial/ethnic and socioeconomic groups. In the article from the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research "National Call to Action to Promote Oral Health," health disparities are caused by poverty, limited education or language skills and geographic isolation.” The CDC website shows the staggering statistics with 40 percent of low income and 70 percent of Hispanic and Latino children in the United States suffering from untreated cavities. My high school is in the Duarte school district with a demographic of 75 percent Hispanic and Latino, 35 percent English Learners and 49 percent in the free and reduced lunch program. The Los Angeles Daily News' article, "USC Mobile Dental Clinic serves local children," described the annual free clinic provided by the University of Southern California (USC) School of Dentistry serving young patients, 50 percent of which were from Duarte. In addition, 87 percent of the children had visible decay and 15 percent had urgent care conditions. For many children, the clinic provided their first dental visit like this one six-year-old girl who had 14 cavities. 

The Duarte district's coordinator of health services, Lisa Dowd said, "I get calls from my health aides sometimes, telling me that there are students in our health office, crying because their teeth are hurting. It’s a serious problem that can lead not only to poor school performance and low attendance, but malnourishment (unable to chew and digest their food) and poor health.”  Growing up, I had horrible-looking teeth caused by cavities and eventually, my self esteem was affected, because I stopped smiling. Decayed teeth are the worst in appearance.  Children could be so mean, so I could see how poor oral hygiene could be connected to poor mental and emotional health, which would result in poor academic performance and attendance.

Dental insurance is not included in most work medical insurance, including Medicaid. For many new immigrants and migrant farm workers, oral health is one of the greatest unmet health needs. Over 54% of migrant children do not have access to dental care and over 87% suffer from untreated tooth decay.   Tooth decay is the number one chronic disease among children and is nearly 100% preventable. Untreated dental disease could also lead to heart disease, cancer and diabetes. Unfortunately, most people are unaware of the association of oral health and general health. 

As my organization is still developing, I have mainly focused on creating a website and educational materials, such as designing and printing 1000 oral hygiene activity books and an informational brochure for the adults. About 700 activity books have been delivered to free or low cost dental clinics in La Puente, Central Calfornia and Mexico.

However, I feel the printed materials are limited in reach and I would like  the lesson to be more fun and interactive.  My solution is to develop an educational game app called Tooth Invaders that teaches oral hygiene and healthy diet to children anytime and anywhere. Children will learn how to take care of their teeth and the dire consequences if they don't.  The gameplay is in an arcade style with tooth invaders/ bacterias attacking the tooth of a child eating throughout their day.  The invaders gradually increase as the choice of food becomes less healthy and they aren't brushing or flossing their teeth quick enough to stop the total tooth decay. Flashing red light indicates pain and the game is over with an ending scene of the boy or girl going to see the dentist for healing in which a player quickly brushes their teeth. Then, the scoreboard pops up at the end of the game to rank players and to motivate repeated play and positive reinforcement. After the app is completed, I would like the next stage to include connecting to a local dentist that could send information for repeated oral care evaluations, coupons for discounted dental care and special bonus incentive to unlock awards for the game. I'm currently in the designing and planning phases. I have some experience coding in Scratch, but we will be using Thunkable to create the app.  In this area of product development and coding, I will need the most support from a mentor from MIT Solve.   

There are three groups of underserved Hispanic and Latino communities that Dental Explorers would be working with directly to promote our solution. 

The first one will be with the elementary schools in my school district. We will be going to Beardslee Dual Language Immersion Academy in May for STEM outreach.  According to the US News website,  the school has a demographic of 91.8 percent Hispanic/Latino, 41 percent English Learners and 85 percent economically disadvantaged students. 

The next group would be the patients of San Gabriel Valley Foundation for Dental Health, a community partner that has already served 276,000 needy children in La Puente with free and low cost dental exams. The city of La Puente has an 80.3 percent Hispanic population.  We provided them with 500 activity books for their young patients to learn about oral health in the waiting room.

The third group would be the patients of the monthly free mobile dental clinics provided by Mission Flight, a non-profit organization, that transports a team of volunteer dentists to serve the migrant farmworkers in Central California. They have served 7,687 people.  I have been an intern since 2021 and volunteer at the mobile clinics as an oral health educator and dental assistant. There are roughly 400,000 agricultural workers who had to work during coronavirus as they were deemed essential workers to provide 2/3 of America's fruit and nuts and 1/3 of vegetables.  Yet, they struggled on the edge of poverty with little or no medical access.  

Another Mission Flight mobile dental clinic that I volunteered at was at the Huichol indigenous village of Huaynamota, Nayarit, the last unreached people group in Mexico.  Over 200 villages are scattered in the remote and rugged mountains of central Mexico. 

Finally, Mission Flight also serves in San Quintin, a large agricultural community in baja Calfornia. 55.7 million people in Mexico live in poverty. As a consequence, 90 percent of Mexicans suffer from dental cavities and other gum diseases. So far, Mission Flight has served 7,678 patients in Central California and Mexico.

With the exception of Huichol village, the children in the other groups have access to a cellular phone. With the Tooth Invaders app, children will be motivated to learn about oral health for a longer period of time and be connected with local dentist offices to ensure routine dental evaluation and special workshops/events.  Most of all, their parents will become more aware of the importance of oral health and be more motivated to ensure routine evaluation happens for their children and for themselves.

Mission Flight, a non-profit organization, led the Aviation merit badge workshop for my Boy Scout troop.  I learned that they were volunteer pilots that would transport volunteer medical and dental professionals  to underserved communities, such as migrant workers in rural Central California and Indigenous people in remote villages in Mexico at their mobile free health clinics.  I started volunteering and realized for the majority of the patients, the mobile dental clinic would be their first dentist visit, which could be scary and confusing for a young child. When I was young, I threw a huge tantrum in the dentist office. I really thought the dentist was going to hurt me. I didn’t understand what was happening  and why some stranger was reaching into my mouth.  The only explanation I got was that it was supposed to be good for my teeth. 

My way of giving back is to alleviate the stress and fears of going to the dentist for the first time and to make the experience more fun and exciting. With educational outreach, families could form healthy habits not just in oral hygiene, but in choosing an overall healthy diet to improve the quality of their life.

For me, I played games to relieve my stress at school and so, I wrote and published a bilingual (English/Spanish) oral hygiene activity book that was fun and educational. The activity book included oral health mazes, word search, puzzles and comics. My first mission trip with Mission Flight was in June when I distributed the activity book and taught oral hygiene to 80 children in the Indigenous village of Huaynamota, Nayarit mountains of Mexico.  I realized the potential to keep growing my educational materials and to make a positive impact in my local community as well with Duarte USD and San Gabriel Foundation for Dental Health.

What started as an Eagle Scout project grew into an aspiring non-profit organization called Dental Explorers.  Together with my sister Alyssa, we were able to design, print and distribute the educational materials with the support of the Dragon Kim Fellowship Program in 2022.  

We are well-positioned to achieve our next solution with the interactive game app as we both have acquired some technical skills from our previous experiences in game and app design.  

Brennan:  In 2020, I won the The Google Play Change The Game Design Challenge with Mathezoic.  As one of the winners, I participated in their Game Changer Jam Session to learn about game design using Unity. In 2022, I was on another team in the New York Science Junior Academy and we won the Public Health Impacts of Climate Change Challenge with the app MiHealth.

Alyssa: In 2020, Alyssa and her team Code Work Ahead won the Technovation North America regional winner for Rooting for You. Later, she continued with another app Full STEAM Ahead and I helped her with the graphic design. The app received honorable mention in Representative Judy Chu's Congressional App Challenge. She used Thunkable to create her apps.

Besides working with community partners such as Duarte USD, Mission Flight, and San Gabriel Valley Foundation for Dental Health, Dental Explorers have received financial support from Dragon Kim Fellowship, Powers of Youth Challenge and Peace First Challenge. While volunteering as an intern for Mission Flight since 2021, I worked as an oral health educator and dental assistant for their mobile free clinics in Central California and Mexico to serve the patients directly.  Besides children, I also saw many adults with cavities and they had to have their teeth pulled.  The dentist told me it was because of the large amount of sugary sodas they drank and the lack of oral hygiene. Because of my experience, I realized how the parents needed to be included in my educational outreach.

Since starting in March 2022, Dental Explorers' mission is to provide educational outreach to underserved communities on oral healthcare. By engaging with the patients and their parents, but also receiving guidance from the volunteer dentists, I have come up with these goals:

Goal 1 is to educate the children with what to expect at their dentist appointment in order to decrease their fears and anxiety.  Part of relieving fear is learning what a dentist does and perhaps inspire future dentists to serve their community. 

Goal 2 is to help develop their good oral hygiene habits to prevent future caviities by providing a free oral hygiene kit and to educate them that good dietary choices would improve the quality of life. 

Goal 3 is to educate the parents by addressing and connecting dental diseases to more serious medical diseases such as heart disease, diabetes and cancer--to bring awareness to the association of oral health and general health.

While I am able to accomplish all the goals with my printed educational materials and the feedback from the patients and community partners are all positive,  I know making the educational game app "Tooth Invaders" will have  a greater impact and affect a larger population beyond the communities we served.

The current oral health game apps are targeted toward toddlers and preschoolers, such as Baby Panda: Dental Care and Tooth Savers Brushing Game. Although both are wonderful educational games to promote proper teeth brushing habits, the current game apps target a higher socioeconomic group of parents with higher education to prioritize time and spending on oral healthcare for their children. These apps are only educational if an adult is present to explain the proper oral care.

The target audience for Tooth Invaders is for an older elementary-age group that is self-motivated to play games for the excitement of reaching a high score, but inadvertently, they learn about the harmful effects of bacteria and the need to go to the dentist for oral health care.  The goal of the game is to increase dental access for racial/ethnic and socioeconomic children whose parents prioritize other life essential needs above dental health. Connecting children to local dentists through the game app, children would be motivated to bring their parents to the low cost or free dental clinics to unlock bonus game awards.  At the dentist, the children will also receive a free oral hygiene kit with a toothbrush, toothpaste and floss.  For many needy children, the visit to the dentist and having a toothbrush will be their first experience. In her article on LinkedIn, "Are there Really More Mobile Phone Owners than Toothbrush Owners?" Jamie Turner spent 3 months doing the research to back up that claim. 

I am hoping Tooth Invaders will be catalytic to promote personal health responsibility for children in a fun and exciting game that would lead to brighter smiles after asking their parents for a dentist visit. I believe children, even teenagers, rely on their parents to make all the oral health decisions.  Unfortunately, these decisions might not be made unless the child is in pain already from cavities causing tooth decay.  With this app, we would like to change the responsibility to that of the child. When a dental clinic offers free check-ups and free awards for the game by attending the event, a child may influence the parent to make the time for preventative care and annual follow ups for the child and the adult.

We hope to have an early protype of Tooth Invaders completed for a soft launch by the beginning of the next school year, September 2023.  

First, we would approach Dental Explorer's three community partners:  Duarte USD, San Gabriel Valley Foundation for Dental Health, and Mission Flight to test the functionality and effectiveness of the game app to their elementary-age students and patients. We will conduct surveys to collect data on the audience and the results.

Second,  we would fix the bugs and improve the gameplay from the feedback.

Third, we would repeat the first and second step until we're satisfied with the product.

Fourth, we would launch the app in the Google App Store and promote the app to local dentist offices.  They will provide us with data on the impact of the app with an increased number of new patients.

The core technology we will be using is Thunkable to code Tooth Invaders.  The art will be created using Adobe Photoshop. 

As we will target the soft launch with Dental Explorers community partners: Duarte USD, San Gabriel Valley Foundation for Dental Health, and Mission Flight, the initial number of people will be around 200 children.   

Our greatest barrier is time as we're both full time students.  There could be some technical challenges, but my partner has already completed an app with Thunkable, so the question would be if we could achieve what we want with the app design using Thunkable.  The reason for using Thunkable is that I will be the one doing most of the art and programming, while it may be more difficult for my partner as a first year college student to work full time.  

The biggest challenge will be marketing and how to have more dentists sign up after San Gabriel Valley Foundation for Dental Health.  Hopefully, we can also build relationships with the volunteer dentists at Mission Flight and in the city of Duarte.  We would need to focus on marketing strategies.

We will also need legal advice in regards to copyrighting our app and how to become a nonprofit organization. 

Dental Explorers' community partners are with Duarte USD, San Gabriel Valley Foundation for Dental Health in La Puente, and Mission Flight in San Gabriel.  Our current partnership mainly consists of my leadership role to teach STEM outreach to the elementary students in Duarte USD. In addition to oral hygiene demonstration with Dental Explorers' activity book with SGV Foundation for Dental Health and with Mission Flight, I also volunteer as a dental assistant in the latter's monthly free dental clinics in Central California and Mexico.  

Before I founded Dental Explorers in 2022, I started off participating in Mission Flight’s youth program as a boy scout and then working as their intern in 2021.  I assisted with the monthly cleaning and maintenance of the plane and the hangar. I also helped design space solutions for their future mobile medical and dental clinics possibly using a shipping container.

• Key Resources:

  • Leadership Staff: Grant writer, Treasurer, Community Partnership and Outreach

  • Education (Printed Materials): Researcher, Teacher, Writer & Artist

  • Social Media/Website Staff: Marketing, Write & Artist

  • App Staff: Game Designer, Writer, Artist & Programmer

• Key Activities:

  • Community Outreach

  • Product Development-App, Website and Printed Educational Materials

• Type of Intervention (products/services):

  • Product: App and Educational Materials

  • Service: Community Outreach

• Segments:

  • Customers:

    • Dentist office, non-profit low cost dental clinics and mobile dental clinics

  • Beneficiaries: 

    • Printed Materials: Hispanic and Latino migrant/low income families.

    • App: For elementary-aged students

• Value Proposition: 

  • Customers: Increase access to new patients that are in need of dental care.

  • Beneficiaries: Increase dental care access to Hispanic and Latino migrant/low income families by connecting them to free and low cost dental clinics. 

  • Impact Measures: # of app downloads, # of new patients

• Partners + Key Stakeholders:

  • Partners: Mission Flight, San Gabriel Valley Foundation for Dental Health, and Duarte USD. 

  • Google Play App Store 

• Channels:

  • Website - https://dentalexplorers.weebly.com/

  • Community Partners: Mission Flight, San Gabriel Valley Foundation for Dental Health, and Duarte USD. 

• Cost Structure:

  • Currently: Educational Material Publications and oral hygiene tooth kits

  • Future: App Store Cost

• Surplus:

  • For community outreach: purchase teeth models for children to learn how to brush and floss their own teeth.

  • Hire more staff

• Revenue:

  • Applying for grants 25%

  • Entering into competitions for prize funds 25%

  • Subscription for dentist office 50%

So far, Dental Explorers has been fortunate to receive grants as Dragon Kim Fellows-$5000, America’s Promise Power of Youth Challenge winner $300, and Peace First Challenge winner $250 to cover the cost of printing over 1000 educational materials and purchasing oral hygiene kits to distribute to the patients of SGV Foundation for Dental Health and Mission Flights. The grants also covered the Mission Flight travel cost to Central California and Mexico.  See our blog. 

With the next solution, we would like to follow the Free-for-service business model where local dentists sign up for membership with a monthly fee to access our database of local users to become their potential long term patients.  Their user information will be collected to create an active and up-to-date database. This monthly subscription fee  provides local dentists the service to make optimal use in improving access to oral health care, so they could connect with more patients on the importance of prevention, early detection, and management of dental diseases.

With initial grant funding, Dental Explorers will recruit new team members to refine and market the app for users and to contact local dentists to sign up for a subscription plan.