Grants announced for student service projects

Three service-based student projects have been awarded grants through a joint effort between the International Journal for Service Learning in Engineering (IJSLE) and the Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter Partnership Foundation.

The IJSLE-Carter Academic Service Entrepreneur (CASE) grants are designed to foster collaborative engineering design efforts in community service projects. Winners of the IJSLE-CASE grants receive $1,000 towards the implementation of their projects along with certificates of merit signed by the Carters.

"The goal of the partnership is to facilitate student engagement in engineering-related service learning activities, from community assessment to final construction of solutions, culminating in the publication of the student's work in a peer-reviewed journal," said Thomas Colledge, assistant professor of engineering design and editor-in-chief of the IJSLE.

The winning concepts include long-distance medical care, a dew collection system and computing for Third-World children.

The first project is called "Mashavu" and centers around the design and development of networked medical stations in Tanzania. Medical information is collected on site and then sent to doctors overseas. The medical professionals then take the aggregated data, including age, height, weight, blood pressure and stereoscope rhythms, and provide medical feedback to the station operators and caregivers in Tanzania. The project is led by Aaron Fleishman, a senior in chemical engineering. Fleishman's project also won a $10,000 prize in social entrepreneurship from Ideablob.com earlier this spring.

The second grant winner is a sensory dew collection system developed by Steven Marshall, a senior in mechanical engineering. Marshall's system will be used at Jacob's Ladder, a Jamaican community for disabled people. The system will provide water for the community while helping to enhance children's daily use of senses. The sensory design techniques involve the sound of running water; various shapes, colors and textures; and children's interaction with their environment.

The final grant winner involves the distribution of laptop computers built by One Laptop Per Child (OLPC). Nicole Laliberte, a graduate student in geography, plans to introduce the OLPC laptop to kindergarten-to-12th-grade students at the Mount Meru Peak School in Tanzania.

Descriptions of the winning projects will be published online on the Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter Partnership Foundation Web site at http://www.jrcpf.org.

The IJSLE was founded at Penn State.