The annual Engineering-Social Justice competition at Cal State Fullerton tasks engineering students with tapping into their expertise to help solve some of society’s more pressing social justice issues, especially those in their own communities.
The “Engineering Social Justice: A Design Challenge” competition was held March 20 in the Titan Student Union and featured teams of engineering students who crafted tools, applications and processes to address a variety of issues such as the mental health and wellness for children from low-income families, women’s safety on college campuses and access to affordable education.
“We have the skills and the knowledge to change the world around us,” said Kristijan Kolozvari, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering and one of three faculty coordinators for the competition. “So why don’t we then try to work towards solving some of the social justice issues?”
The challenge started with 13 teams that were encouraged to examine the problem from social, economic and business perspectives.
The competition was then pared down to nine teams, whose projects were on display and evaluated by a team of judges.
First place, which includes a $6,000 award, went to the team titled CatByte for its design called Catpanion, an on-demand aid device, shaped like a friendly-looking, round-faced silicone cat, designed to mitigate anxiety for children in therapy.
CatByte teammates David Frias and Bazil Alvarez designed Catpanion to provide mental health assistance for low-income and minority children during critical ages of mental development by offering a cost-effective portable device developed in collaboration with mental health professionals.
“What we realized after doing a lot of extensive research is that mental health issues are really drastic in children, especially within ethnically diverse and lower-income communities,” Frias said.
For Alvarez, the motivation for developing Catpanion stemmed from his own experience.
“My family is low income, and I’ve been through a situation where my sisters didn’t have the mental health care they needed,” Alvarez said. “And so, I saw an issue and I (thought) let me just develop something that can actually be an intermarriage between the therapy and the child.”
Second place and $4,000 went to Team Care for its application called CAaRE (Caretaker Assistance and Resources Engine).
CAaRE was tailored to simplify and personalize the work of caretakers in a variety of ways such as consolidating medication management, appointment scheduling, alarms, planners and connections with therapists into one seamless platform.
Third place and $2,000 went to Defending Hearts and Harmony for the development of a multifunctional application called Wlk (short for Walk), which is designed to enhance women’s safety on campus by enabling the women to book a trained and equipped female student to walk them to and from parts of campus during the later hours of the evening.
“It’s essentially aimed at mitigating issues with women’s safety across campus because of the recent uptake in sexual assault crimes, rape and harassment,” team member Hafsa Farooqui said.
Using Wlk, walking partners who are trained by the police department would be called upon to accompany female students as they walk to their campus location.
A $500 award for the best poster went to Transfer Assist, a consolidated research assistance application for transfer students.
The competition was funded by the $40 million Scott-Jewett Fund for Student Success and Innovation grant, which was donated to the university in 2022 to fund projects that focus on student success and innovation through the lens of social justice.
The design challenge received $60,600 from the grant.
Event coordinator Garrett Struckhoff, professor of civil and environmental engineering, said including freshman and sophomore engineering students was a priority, even though those students are taking mostly math, physics and science courses and not yet taking engineering courses.
“We feel like they come in with a lot of passion about what they see in their communities,” Struckhoff said. “We want to be able to bring in students who don’t have the tool set just yet, but who have great ideas about ways that they can impact their own communities.”
Members of the first-place team from the 2023 design challenge, “Open-Source Pantry Solutions,” were on hand to talk about the inroads they’ve made over the past year in marketing an inventory management software application called “Bag/Get” that enables collaboration between individuals, food banks and food pantries to provide up-to-date information on inventories of food at the facilities.
Most of the $6,000 has gone toward market research and development costs, team member Rohan Kunchala said.
“We’ve spoken to pantries and food banks in Shasta County all the way down to San Diego, Los Angeles, every city we’ve tried to hit within California,” Kunchala said. “And we spent a lot of time and effort on just doing that first.”
The inspiration for starting the competition evolved from a conversation among faculty members from the College of Engineering on how engineering can be used to help solve issues related to social justice.
“It’s wonderful to have collaborative, co-curricular experiences like Engineering Social Justice for our students,” said Susan Barua, dean of CSUF’s College of Engineering and Computer Science. “Their innovative ideas in the space of social impact really drive home how our students can take the technical skills honed in the CSUF classroom and apply them to make a tangible difference in the world.”
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