First and foremost, welcome to The Zen Ten's web page where we will post and write about our progress during the Girls Build Los Angeles challenge. The Zen Ten is a team of 9 girls who currently attend the Girls Academic Leadership Academy, 6 of us attend the 6th grade, and 3 of us attend the 7th grade (plus our supervisor). We are a team made up of different cultural backgrounds, shapes, and sizes who all share the same goal; we all hope to make a difference in the world. For our project, we had chosen to work on health and wellness aspect of the challenge. Moreover, we decided that we should focus on a very interesting topic that most of us are very well familiar with.
As middle school students in the 6th and 7th grade, we understand how emotionally pressuring and frustrating school can be. We are also aware of all the negative impacts of stress. However, we were never taught how to properly deal with stress in a healthy way. Our project for this year's Girls Build Los Angeles challenge is to teach students effective ways to cope with stress, along with ways to decrease and avoid it. This year, we hope to film an online curriculum that can be used by teachers across Los Angeles that teaches in-class stress-relieving activities. We will also host a "Zen Fair" at our own school.Team Zen Ten is ecstatic for this year's competition and cannot wait to see what the project evolves to! Thank you so much for your support!