EPICS team makes educational impact from Indiana to India
Team India isn’t just a class for Roshni Pothireddy and Saahil Varma. It’s a passion project with global-scale impact.
Varma, a senior at Purdue University, and Pothireddy, a sophomore, have spent four and two years building and testing science experiment lab kits with their Engineering Projects in Community Service (EPICS) team in Southwestern Middle School, Klondike Middle School and Mintonye Elementary School in Lafayette, Indiana.
The kits’ destination isn’t in Indiana, though. It’s in Tirupati, India.
Team India’s Mobile Science Lab (MSL) team been active since 2018 with the goal of creating mobile science kits, made with easily accessible materials and clear instructions, to enhance children’s hands-on learning of scientific concepts in Indian schools.
Each kit includes safety directions, instruction manuals and video demonstrations of experiments in the local language, Tamil. Kits teach skills varying from microscope usage and terminology to creating the quick-reacting elephant’s toothpaste. Each is created with accessible resources in mind so that materials can be replaced or easily purchased at a nearby market.
The team has created 70 experiments. Just over half are complete and have been delivered to the Indian Institute of Technology in Tirupati (IITT), India, which will live in an MSL vehicle. The kits, created and tested in West Lafayette, will benefit children that the EPICS team may never meet.
It’s the kind of impact Pothireddy knew she wanted to make, even from a world away.
“I was fascinated by the idea of working with students in India to develop solutions to problems they were faced with,” said Pothireddy, an Integrated Business and Engineering student. “Being able to apply my knowledge and see a project come to life was something I hoped to accomplish in EPICS. It’s awesome to see it happen now.”
To ensure that students benefitted from the experiments, Team India gave Lafayette classrooms two evaluations: one for each child to fill out about what they knew about a subject before starting the lab, and one after to see what they had retained from the activity. The surveys were instrumental for making sure each experiment was using the right materials and the clearest instructions.
Once the labs were approved, the same kits were shipped to Tirupati. The IITT team use them regularly to engage students in younger grades while the Purdue team continues to work on the upper-middle school and high school experiments. The “mobile” part of MSL will come after the kits are all in Tirupati. For now, team members ship the labs from place to place in their own cars.
It’s a culmination of Varma’s four years at Purdue, in 70 storage-sized kits.
“This has been going on for seven years,” Varma said, “and the buildup to these experiments has been slow. Now, we’re in an exponential curve. We went from looking for partners and doing one grade level’s experiments at a time, then two, and now we’re doing four grades at once.”
Before he attended Purdue, Varma knew he wanted to be on Team India.
“I remember as a prospective student seeing the EPICS in India project, and I thought it was cool that they were connected to one of the greatest universities in India,” said Varma, a biomedical engineering major. “And when I saw that we could go work with kids and do science experiments with them, I couldn’t say no.”
Though EPICS students can change projects every semester, Varma didn’t budge from the MSL.
Varma joined the team in 2021 as the project archivist. He became a design lead in 2023 with a slightly larger team of 15 students. He has been proud of the current eight-person team, most of whom are still in their first year with Team India, accomplish the approval and delivery of 15 lab kits in the past semester alone. Varma suspects that most of the team will stick with the project, just like he did, to its completion or until their graduation.
Whichever comes first.
“Everyone who comes on the team is really excited, and those who have left always ask about how it’s going,” Varma said. “I like mentoring my teammates who are in the same boat I was four years ago. And this project is all about helping children. How can you say no to helping kids?”
Fortunately for Team India students, this means studying slides under microscopes and making elephant toothpaste themselves, and then doing the same with children at nearby schools. It’s a chance to be an engineer and a little kid at the same time: the perfect recipe of work and play that makes Team India a passion project for the whole team.
“Team India gave me a way to give back to the country that my family is from,” she said.
It’s a lot of work packed into a single one- or two-credit course. But the experience — and sometimes, the rewards — make the time more than worth it.
“I love working on this project. It doesn’t feel at all like work,” Varma said. “IITT is running 40 of our experiments at an upcoming science day. It’s great to see the work you’ve been doing take off, and on the other side of the world.”