Mobile Science Lab
 

Collaboration with IIT Tirupati

​

The Mobile Science Lab team is partnered with the Indian Institute of Technology - Tirupati (IITT) and is working on designing and implementing a mobile science lab to enhance STEM education for 4th-10th graders in poor village communities surrounding Tirupati. The schools in this area lack sufficient hands-on experiments to demonstrate scientific concepts, which prompted a collaboration between the local IITT and EPICS at Purdue to develop a solution.

 

The first stage of this project was to design and test 20+ experiments involving concepts addressed in the children's school curriculum The second stage was to design a mechanism to transport the experiments and their materials to local schools and understanding the logistics of the system. In Fall 2019, a rickshaw was chosen by the EPICS team at Purdue and IITT to be the current mode of transportation.
 

Currently, the Mobile Science Lab is split into two sub teams: the experiments and the storage teams. The goal for the experiment sub team is to come up with 20-25 new experiments that cover more grades and subjects within the Tirupati curriculum than the pilot labs did. These new experiments will not replace the original set but will add on to them to create a wide range of ideas. When these experiments are considered and modified in Spring 2020, they will then be tested on between those team members and at local schools in the West Lafayette and Tirupati area. Meanwhile, the storage team plans on designing a storage component that can fit in the trunk of a rickshaw and carry the lab supplies and materials from school to school.