Our RE@LBlog RePost focuses directly on our upcoming STEM software product on reducing all student nicotine use.
What do science and mathematics tell us about tobacco use? RE@L and its partner Moai Technologies will be releasing this coming school year a new software product that features RE@L’s innovative learning activities that work. Click on the graphic to the right for more information on Moai Technologies.
Our joint goal is stop the use of tobacco (nicotine) before it ever begins. And for those who’ve started and care about their health to quit.
Regulating the use of tobacco products is the Federal Food and Drug Administration, more commonly know as FDA. They face a daunting task: Over 41 million adults use tobacco in one form or another, more than 20% of the population.
But even worse, our middle-school students today, tomorrow’s adults, show few signs of quitting tobacco use once they start.
The Center for Disease Control tells us that 5 million students in grades 6-12 use tobacco. Nearly 30 percent of high-school students are current users, and are followed by 10 percent of all middle school students. Our strategy is to stop tobacco use before students ever start.
Those statistics are a great concern to the FDA and to the Surgeon General as well. These growing numbers pose a great threat to our healthcare system in the future as more tobacco users are in need of advanced healthcare.
Here’s the details of early smoking:
“For the fifth year in a row, e-cigarettes (20.8%) were the most commonly used tobacco product among high schoolers, followed by cigarettes (8.1%), cigars (7.6%), smokeless tobacco (5.9%), hookah (4.1%), and pipe tobacco (1.1%).
Among middle schoolers, e-cigarettes (4.9%) were also the most commonly used tobacco product, followed by cigarettes (1.8%), smokeless tobacco (1.8%), cigars (1.6%), hookah (1.2%), and pipe tobacco (0.3%).
Vaping is currently causing more and more students to start, or continue, tobacco use.“
Click on the graphic above for more information.
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) was delegated the authority to regulate the manufacture, distribution, and marketing of tobacco products. To their credit, FDA Regulation is one reason we now see Big Tobacco’s ads in our daily papers lauding the use of vaping as a better tobacco user’s choice. While directed at adults, these vaping ads also entice our students.
Another enticement to start tobacco use among our youth is the menthol cigarette. Click on the graphic to the right to learn more. We need to find more effective ways to stop our middle-school students from starting tobacco use in the first place.
RE@L’s Executive Vice President, Product Development, Don Rawitsch is also serving as Principal Investigator to lead the creation of a new and effective STEM software product to stop tobacco use before it starts.
Here’s Don’s overview on this exciting, new product:
This new, collaborative product attempts to approach the problem from two, key perspectives. It contains extensive factual information about nicotine’s effect on the human body, the addictive power of nicotine, and the methods used to market nicotine-based products to adolescents.
It also raises issues about adolescent decision making and the reasons behind young people starting these habits, based on curiosity, peer pressure, and misunderstandings about the dangers of nicotine use.
Information on both vaping and smoking is provided in this new software product. Even though adolescent smoking has lately been in decline, the marketing approach taken by nicotine product companies in promoting vaping bears resemblances to how it was handled in past decades when smoking was practiced by a significant percentage of the population. Students can learn from these lessons from the past.
The product is targeted at middle school students because that is often the key age range when young people first come into contact with nicotine products and when they make the initial decision to use them. Students need more knowledge and support for this confusing time in their lives.
The product is not designed to preach the “no nicotine” message to students. Typically, young people don’t trust adult judgments and often aren’t persuaded by arguments for what “might” happen to them in the future no matter the dire statistics.
- engages them in what students experience,
- provides factual information, and
- triggers teacher guided class discussion.
It’s imperative that we full advantage of the power of online technology to engage young people. It is destined for initial marketing in late 2019.”
Research reported in this publication was supported by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences of the National Institutes of Health under Award Number R44GM130155. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.
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Thanks, Don, for this exciting, new product update! We can’t wait to see it in action this coming school year!
In closing, RE@L hopes to “clear the air” and clear the use of tobacco among young students before it begins.
RE@L will play a major role in the solution to end tobacco use in our schools with our coming software product.
RE@L cares! Stay tuned for our next RE@LBlog!