My Current Article in Carnegie Mellon Today, January 2011

As the Crow Flies

Two Carnegie Mellon students board a flight from Pittsburgh to New York, the first stop on their trip. For Jen Horwitz, who studies public policy and management, traveling isn't a big deal. The East Coast native has been abroad. But she has never been to Bangladesh. Neither has computer science student Anthony Vel†zquez. That's the final destination for their internship.

After New York, the pair touchdown in Dubai and meet up with two classmates from the Qatar campus: Brian Manalastas, studying business administration, and Aysha Siddique, a computer science and information systems student. They exchange hugs. This is their first meeting, though they've taken a videoconference course together.

The interns are in flight again as part of the TechbridgeWorld Innovative Student Technology ExPerience project. Through a 10-week internship, iSTEP provides students a chance to apply their knowledge and skills for creative problem solving outside the classroom, and, in this case, many miles from home. The multi-faceted problem awaiting this group entails developing an educational tool to enhance English literacy among pre-college students, and to determine features for a standalone Braille writing tutor for visually impaired children.

The interns land in Dhaka, capital city of Bangladesh, and have a chance to unwind at a nearby rest house during a six-hour layover. On the cab ride there, they witness the "organized chaos" of Bangladeshi traffic. Eventually, the group arrives in Chittagong, where even in the middle of the night it's more than 90 degrees.

They soon meet with their primary partner, Young Power in Social Action, to start determining what they could best accomplish during their stay. A few weeks later, Horwitz, in her role as needs assessment and evaluation coordinator, leads the visit to the Chittagong Government School for the Blind. The school has just one computer allocated for the students; it runs on DOS and is subject to sporadic power outages, a challenge for all of Bangladesh. The team uses its collective computer science knowledge to make the limited technology work for the iSTEP Braille learning game that is based on animal sounds, a game first implemented by iSTEP in Tanzania.

The interns encounter yet another problem as they work with the Bangla elementary school children sent here from across the country. In Tanzania, the game included sounds from a pig, an animal not common in the Muslim world. So, for the Bangla version, the iSTEP team adroitly substitutes a crow instead. The students gleefully recognize its squawk. Lesson accomplished.

After multiple visits to the school, the internship ends. It takes nearly 45 minutes for Horwitz and the others to leave amid the children's hugs and good-byes.
-Nazbanoo Pahlavi (HNZ'03)