ITM 295 Portfolio Service Project engages students in service-learning opportunities to bless other lives by using the skills and knowledge they gained through their course of study in their degree program. It is designed to help students achieve the mission of BYU-Idaho to – “develop disciples of Jesus Christ who are leaders in their homes, the Church, and their communities” (University Mission Statement).
Examples of volunteer service performed by students in previous semesters are listed below with excerpts from their journal entries.
Serve as an assistant instructor at “Coding for Kids” at a public library where children ages 8 through 12 learn the programing concepts using Scratch (developed by MIT). “Today there were a lot more children and they through a lot of interesting questions at me. … The most interesting question of the day was a boy who was making a space invaders clone. His missiles were hitting the aliens and disappearing but the aliens weren’t dying. We found out that it’s because his code to control alien movement and alien death were in one if-else statement. While the code was running the movement it couldn’t also execute the death code. It was a good opportunity to help him think like a computer and look more at how his code is actually executed.”
Build a prototype sensor module which monitors and manages a saltwater coral reef tank. The module monitors the water temperature and water level, sends information to a remote server, and controls the lighting and water change cycle. “I was able to finish working on the temperature sensor today. It is now set up to return all of the values that I need for the database. I also began experimenting with the optical sensor for the Automatic Top-off module. I was unable to find an accurate datasheet for this module and was forced to begin testing at my own peril. I ended up burning out the LED inside the sensor. So I have a new one ordered and arriving by Nov 4th. Since that happened, I decided to look up the datasheets for all of the physical components that I need. I was able to find several.”
Serve as an assistant sysadmin at a small but growing IT company in California. The student is a full-time employ of a large enterprise with a title of Technical Systems Analyst III. “I took Friday 10/5/18 off work and went to work with the Owner. We began our day troubleshooting a Virus that seemed to have infested 2 users accounts. Their Office 365 email account got infiltrated and was sending out spam. … My second day … was another interesting insight into small business workings. We started our day off at 5am and drove north [for] about 1 hour to a Flower Grower in Carlsbad, CA. …”
Provide consultation to increase online presence for a cable manufacturing company where he once worked as a consultant to assist them in managing their website and web traffic in attempts to increase sales. “I coordinated with the Product Manager … about competitors and what we can do! … I spent a few good hours in Analytics attempting to figure out exactly where the users are going, and we seem to agree on that analysis. The new competitor list was quite alarming. I showed him some of the Analytics, and he also expressed the need for part numbers for ease of use on the website. … So I started building the page that has all of the part numbers. The most difficult part of this page will be making it Google indexable in order to best facilitate the purpose of the page!”
Serve as an IT technician to assist the owner of a local electronics and appliance store which provides IT support for various small businesses in town. “An apartment complex was complaining of intermittent Wi-Fi and slow speeds. … We went out to the site and did signal tests at each of the AP locations. I found a number of concerns in the exterior [and interior] cabling… We … decided that … we would remove all the “jankiness” from the installation to actually have a professional and commercial level installation. However, there was a refrigerator issue and [we needed to attend to it as my sponsoring company is an appliance store]. So my first two hours were spent loading and unloading, unpacking and moving a new refrigerator which ultimately didn’t fit, so we had to load it back up and take it back then put it in the showroom [of the appliance store]. Then we got yet another refrigerator and put it in the apartment, put their food back in, and took away the old one. Once all that was finished, we were able to rewire all the apartments in building one.”
Design and develop an online healthcare provider directory listing in the country of Albania, including their demographic information, specialties, facilities they work on, etc. “Followed up with the advisor of the Minister of Health in Albania. After a discussion with her, she let me know that she scheduled the appointment for Monday, Jan 21 at noon to meet with the Minister of Health of Albania to present this project.”
Serve as a developer of an accounting system using Excel and teach the clients how to use it. His brother-in-law runs a small loan company oversees. They use a pen and a paper to keep their financial transactions. “I’ve met with my Brother-in-law and his wife to get to know their business better. They started by explaining to me everything related to their work and what was it about. They showed me the things they do and how they do them, how they organize their work, what do they use for data storage and more. After looking at all that, I reviewed with them my proposal to see if it would meet their needs and expectations. …”
Serve as a web designer and developer for a local Food Bank and their affiliates to facilitate their web presence so those in need can find them easily. “This week the committee approved my designs but not the colors I chose. They instead wanted to go with a white background and black text. The committee would like to see a live sample of the website I proposed and green lighted me making it. I told my supervisor that it could be hard on the eyes if people are going to be spending a lot of time on the website and recommended a more neutral color. He said no, so I went to work and began marking up the pages. … I am now waiting for feedback on what I made and will hopefully hear from them by next week.”
Serve as an IT technician at a local school district. “A work order for a slow running computer came in, so Gary and I went to check it out. What we ended up doing was multiple things. First, we removed the temporary files. Second, we removed all unneeded users. We then ran Malwarebytes to see what it could find. Malwarebytes found 620 objects, so we quarantined the problems. The final thing we did was make sure windows was up to date. After the windows updates were installed, we restarted the computer and it seemed to run much better.”
Serve as an IT technician for elderly people in his community. Also serve as a mentor to young people to strengthen their IT skills. He owns and operates a small IT company. “I spent a little over an hour this week visiting an older ward member in their home to show them how to create a new Gmail account and transfer their data to it from the old account that had become targeted by spam and scams. I worked with him to create a stronger password for his account instead of just using the same one over and over again. I think that his previous security problems stemmed from his reusing passwords across multiple platforms.”
Serve as a web designer and developer for an artist to showcase his artwork online. “I met with Jonathan for an hour and he decided the color scheme. We made some adjustments to the structure of the home page. I created all of the different components like paintings, illustrations, sculptures and more. Each component has its own typescript, CSS and HTML. Making it this way allows me to modularize the website.”
Help an NGO use Cloud based solution “There is a non-profit organization that I have collaborated with at times that I would be able to help them get into a cloud based infrastructure service and layout how they could benefit from this approach. The NGO is called Iduka and has as an objective helping students in less developed countries gather financial means to attend higher education. They have been working for a while but have struggled with funding, and as an NGO with little infrastructure and basically starting. They could benefit enormously from moving their back office functions to the cloud and use could services that, in some cases, are donated for free by cloud services with a strong philanthropic corporate culture.”