Service Learning

To satisfy the service learning competency, I decided to do EPICS, Engineering Projects in Community Service. Our project is Jirani Digital Library, and we are tasked with building an offline digital library in Kenya. The current situation in the area is that there is very little access to educational materials in western Kenya and students need a way to access currently relevant content. 

While the service learning competency only requires 2 semesters of EPICS, passionate about this project I stayed for an extended amount of time from Spring 23 to Fall 2025. Throughout this time we prototyped, built, deployed, and pitched to stakeholders. Our solution was to build a completely offline digital library that functioned as a Wi-FI hotspot to provide educational access to literature and video content. Implemented on a Raspberry Pi, this project was iterated and developed over the course of 3 years with steady upgrades and expansions. Throughout this time, we won 3 EPIC elite pitch challenges eclipsing over $5000 granted from the Fulton Schools along with recieving the Fulton Experimental Grant to visit Kenya in Summer of 2025. 

As I mentioned in my home page, educational expansion via hardware is probably the spike of these theme and it was led primarily by these semesters. It fits in the theme of Joy of Living quite well since educational access is a problem across the world, and requires engineering solutions to fix. It was an incredibly rewarding experience to do this and I made so many friends here at ASU and in Kenya, and I likely wouldn't have taken EPICS to begin with if it wasn't for GCSP and missed out on this opportunity.