Making a difference found Seneca Simon in reflection mode at Luddy Hall about what she and her fellow Laurie Burns McRobbie Serve IT Clinic team members had accomplished in helping the community in general, Stone Belt in particular, by putting their Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering-honed education to good use.
“We learned how to be flexible, and gained a better understanding of how non-profits function, what their needs are and how they have to prioritize certain parts to make their non-profit run,” said Simon, a junior honors Informatics student as part of the semester-ending poster display.
Stone Belt is a south-central Indiana non-profit organization that provides resources and support for individuals with disabilities. It partners with the Bloomington community to prepare, empower and support people with developmental disabilities and their families to thrive in community life.
An easy-to-use, informative website is critical for that. That’s where the Serve IT team came in. The result -- “They now have a functioning website,” Simon said.
Simon and fellow team members Yash Rajore, Josh Smith, Jack Engel and Natalie Pearlman were one of 16 posters showcased. Una Thacker, director of Community Engaged Learning, said the projects displayed as posters reflected an impressive culmination of semester work.
“It’s like a poster form of a case study for a portfolio,” she said. “Each of them is a different project. Everyone is working with a client. We try to mimic the work environment.”
Thacker added that Serve IT’s purpose is to “connect these busy, hungry interested students with projects they can run with.”
“We know our non-profits need help with technology,” Thacker said. “That’s what our students are doing. They work hard every semester, whether it’s teaching kids in after-school clubs or helping with website accessibility.”
Thacker said usability, accessibility and security are big issues for non-profit websites, and Luddy students’ knowledge and expertise are making a difference.
“We’re helping them build websites so they can get the word out about their services,” Thacker said.
The Serve IT team’s mission with Stone Belt was to redesign the non-profit’s website so that it more efficiently catered to employees and donors.
“They clearly needed updates,” Simon said. “Watching how they prioritize working with us along with keeping their non-profit running and maintaining their current website was challenging for them. Knowing what they wanted throughout the process helped.”
Rajore, a senior majoring in Informatics at the Luddy School and in Marketing for the Kelley School of Business, said their team implemented website changes based on conversations with Stone Belt officials as well as from an earlier prototype.
Smith, a junior Informatics major, said the biggest challenges were getting the website to look and function properly. They settled on WordPress, a web content management system.
“Eventually, we got the pages to work and look the way we wanted them to look,” he said. “It ended up pretty well.”
Another poster display came from Teach IT Lincoln, which worked with the Bloomington Lincoln Boys and Girls Club. Team members met with students in grades four through six once a week during the semester to teach them technology concepts such as artificial intelligence, digital art, virtual reality, and Photoshop.
“We worked with children and people who have difficulties with technology,” said team co-lead Arhaan Gupta, a senior Informatics and Finance major. “Our goal was to influence the younger generation coming up to learn more about Informatics, something that is very essential in the future.”
Also on the team were co-lead Sia Sardana, a senior Informatics and Finance major; Isabel Nold, a junior Informatics major; Lorraine Hernandez, a junior Informatics major; and Luke Wojciuch, a junior Computer Science and Information Systems major.
“It’s very important to be able to use technology as your best tool,” Gupta said. “That’s what we took this workshop and that’s why we decided to work with the Lincoln Boys and Girls Club.”
Beyond the poster session, Serve IT also had an accessibility/usability team deliver a presentation to improve the southern Indiana town of Washington’s website.
“It was fascinating to see them go through the entire site and talk about the usability issues, the broken links and the accessibility problems so that Washington can fix its site,” Thacker said. She added that it was a major undertaking given the website had 500 pages.
“It was a lot to deal with and take on,” she said. “They worked through it. Because of their efforts, anybody who is trying to access services in Washington will now have an easier time.”