Team Description

Engineering Projects In Community Service or better known as EPICS was created to provide innovative solutions for nonprofit organizations by university students. There are multiple teams within EPICS each of these teams specialize in some type of project.

The Greater Lafayette Elementary Education Team strives to promote and develop interest for engineering by creating a classroom experience where interactive, inquiry-based exhibits expand math, science, technology, and engineering concepts. The mission of the GLEE team is to design and create hands-on projects at the Happy Hollow Elementary School to foster the middle school students’ interest in learning.

GLEE is separated into two teams. The learning racetrack and the robotic arm team. The goal of the learning racetrack team is to help 6th grade students grow interest in learning. The learning racetrack was started in 2006, and worked properly for the project partners when delivered.

The top photo is of the final product and the bottom photo is of the what the project looked like at the beginning of the semester.

Summary of project

The project is designed to entice students to race head to head with each other by answering questions within different school subjects. These can be broken down to two types of questions, Math related question, and multiple choice questions.

— Math

• — Binary to decimal conversion
• — Decimal to binary conversion
• — Arithmetic (addition, multiplication, etc.)
• — Basic Algebra (5x = 10, etc.)

Multiple Choice

• English
• Science
• History
• etc

Students are presented question on an Android device which if answered correctly will move the car incrementally on the racetrack. The first student to finish 3 laps wins.

All the code is open source and you can take a peak at it here.

One of my teammates has a more in depth description of the project. Check it out.