The first time I heard about GCSP was the summer before my freshman year (2022) at ASU. I signed up for the program because I was mainly interested in the different faucets of engineering beyond the technical aspects. FSE150 was such a pivotal class for me, not just academically but also when it came to making connections. I met people that day to join me on my ASU journey and it was nice being able to collaborate and work with them as we progressed through the degree even on different paths.
In FSE150, I wrote my research paper on sustainability mainly solar panel in agricultural efficency, which I thought was interesting but it didn't really speak to me. However, our future solutions project focused on the concept of gamefication of education which is what got my interest in the subject. For a different assignment, I spoke with Dr. Nelson in the Fulton Teacher's College and he helped me discover the difference between educational games and the gamefication of education.
When it came time for my Service Learning requirement, I picked EPICS since I heard good reviews of the program from older GCSP students during the welcome back event. The project I chose was Jirani Digital Library, an offline digital library dedicated to educational access in rural Kenya. I stayed on this project for 6 semesters, and through it made some amazing connections at ASU and did many EPICS events with them. We won the Elite Pitch contest in 2024, and in 2025 were fortunate enough to win the ELG scholarship and travel to Kenya and implement the device there. The amount of protoyping was immense, but this project helped me learn skills in Linux and hardware while making personal and professional connections.
In the summer of 2023, I went to Japan with Professor Kobayashi (Yoshi) and it was an incredible experience. The other students and I had a lot of fun exploring Tokyo and learning about the immense culture of Japan. It further reinforced my perspective on multicultural power in engineering and how culture leads to design.
I then took FSE301 to continue this journey of gamefication of education. My proposal continued that and was focused on giving the user creative feedback to help them become a better coder. It also helped me learn the keys of pitching things, and we used that to further our proposal in EPICS and gain funding.
For my capstone, I wanted to continue something similar so I chose GreyBox UNI which allows for an offline educational tool. In this, I spun by Barrett Thesis off of it and created a chatbot in Rasa to handle key user intents.
GCSP has been a landmark moment in my time at ASU. Besides, the key competencies it also gave me access to a community where ideas could be shared along with opportunities. I found out about Hackathons from GCSP and attended several, most notably HackHarvard in Boston with help from the ELG again. It was great occasionally, running into people from my FSE150 years later and catching up on what they did in their time at ASU.