The Global Digital Transformation Clinic

The GalápaGo! team teamed up with the Galapagos Chamber of Tourism to develop a tourist-friendly application that encourages visitors to explore local businesses, respect sustainability efforts, and learn social customs.

Organisation: Chamber Of Tourism

Advisor: Silvia Figueira PhD

Students: Kristina Andersen, Kat Hibbert, Mariah Manzano, Catrina Nguyen, Jilian Coveney, Junhan Deng, Abhilash Harish and Briana McGovern

Smallholder farmers worldwide are highly vulnerable to climatic variations as most depend on rain-fed agriculture. Additionally, the farmers cultivate marginal areas susceptible to climate change and lack critical access to real-time climate forecasting that supports their decision-making process. By utilizing human-centric design and frugal innovation principles, we developed a mobile phone application called NicaAgua with and for our partner organization CII-ASDENIC. Its basic capabilities are: uploading and sharing timely data from a local weather station, broadcasting weather and water information such as flood warnings and visualizing weather forecast data to better prepare farmers for crop planting and harvesting given weather variations and climatic changes.

Interesting to learn more about the NicaAgua app? Click here

Organisation: ASDENIC

Advisor: Angela Musurlian, Allan A. Báez Morales, Iris Stewart-Frey, Ed Maurer

Students: Alexa Grau, Justin Ling, Greta Setlz, Abhilash Harish, Briana McGovern, Giuliano Silva Zanotti, Gautam  Chitnis, Tanmay Singla, Alexander Avila, Turner Uyeda, Sara Wheeler, Briana Guingona

Eighty-one babies within their first month of life die each day in Uganda. Developed in partnership with Rose Academies, OmwanaThrive is a mobile application for rural mothers that includes educational lessons with culturally relevant graphics and limited text, help with navigation to nearby clinics, and reminder messages about important healthcare checkup dates.*

Organisation: Rose Academics

Advisors: Silvia Figueira PhD, Michele Parker PhD

Students: Story DeWeese, Tiffany Lee, Samantha Sy, Emily Zhang
College of Arts & Sciences Students: Tia Halsey, Hayley Seeno, Tatiana Valentine, Chloe Wong

*Students could not deploy project on-site due to COVID-19.

Every year, 11 million metric tons of plastics enter our ocean on top of the estimated 200 million metric tons that currently circulate in our marine environments. Plastic has been found in more than 60% of all seabirds and 100% of sea turtle species. The ECOINS game teaches young kids to prevent plastic, glass, and cartons from reaching the ocean. They also learned that all recyclable items need to be clean, dry, and separated to be disposed of. Moreover, while playing the ECOINS game, kids can win ECOINS (points) that their parents can later exchange for movie tickets, food at restaurants, and many other activities.
ECOINS was in the news in Costa Rica. Check it out!

Want to play the ECOINS game? Click here

Organisation: ECoins

Advisor: Allan Baez Morales

Grad students: Tanmay Singla, Atharva Viraj Kukade, Gautam Chitnis

UNICEF estimates that there are 7,000 street children in Rwanda while close to 300,000 live in families where a minor is the head of the household. Sheer-Love Rwanda is dedicated to reaching street children to reintegrate them back into their local community through education. The Sheer Love Rwanda app seeks to engage those children in educational activities via mobile phone technology. The Homelga app allows children to do their homework via mobile phone technology. A second application for this organization called TwigeEnglish helps kids improve their English by doing phone exercises on the mobile phone.

Organisation: Sheer Love Rwanda

Advisor: Silvia Figueira PhD

Grad students: Shashikala Mahadevappa, Supraja Sampathkumar, Jagadeesh Marali,
Deep Virag Savla, Jagadeesh Marali, Rani Rajurkar, Vivek Saravanan, Dion DuPree, DeVon DuPree, Brian Burnett, Jillian Coveney, Kristin Tong, Nanki Sekhon

Public elementary and middle schools in the US encounter multiple challenges to better serve their students. From financial problems to a lack of infrastructure to internal information management. The Equation2Sucess app seeks to provide a technological tool for elementary and middle schools located in disenfranchised areas of L.A., California. USA to identify and keep track of internal cases of students such as bullying, academic deficiencies, or classroom issues. The app will also track and share successful cases where issues got solved so best practices can be shared The goal of the app is to build a community support network within schools that involves all stakeholders to solve students’ issues.

Organisation: Equation2Success

Advisor: Allan Baez Morales

Grad students: Shashikala Mahadevappa, Jagadeesh Marali, Supraja SampathKumar, Aishwarya Subhlok, Gautam Chitnis, Tejas Potty, Saurabh Thalkari, Nisarg Bhalavat, Akshay Bhandary, Harsh Zota

This application creates stimulating educational modules built around themes that draw analogies between animal and human behavior to teach children about social issues; such as human trafficking.

Organisation: Dries Rutten, Syed Jaffar Mujtaba, Nami-Tida Essers (Students of Leuven University, Belgium)

Advisor: Silvia Figueira PhD

Grad students: Nolita Rego, Benita Rego, Akshay Satishkumar Kanehitlu, Abhishek Shukla