Luddy Align

2024-2025 Academic Year Report

The Luddy ALIGN initiative continues to grow as a cornerstone of experiential education at the Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering, serving both the Bloomington and Indianapolis campuses. ALIGN—Applied + Leadership + Industry + Government + Networking—remains our framework for connecting academic learning with real-world application. These pillars drive our efforts to expand cross-curricular programming, strengthen community-engaged learning, and foster student innovation and entrepreneurship.

This year, ALIGN has further refined its mission to streamline partnerships and expand opportunities that prepare Luddy students for meaningful, future-focused careers. Through close collaboration with Career Services, Development, and our industry partners, we are cultivating sustainable pathways that enhance employment readiness while deepening alumni and community involvement in our students’ success.

The 2024–2025 report highlights the innovative projects, collaborations, and learning opportunities that define experiential education at Luddy. These initiatives reflect the dedication of our faculty, the creativity of our students, and the strong network of partners who support this work. As always, our goal is not only to showcase achievements but also to provide a valuable resource for discussions on the transformative role experiential learning plays across campus. We invite you to explore the following report to see how ALIGN continues to advance Luddy’s mission of preparing students to lead, innovate, and serve in a rapidly evolving world. For questions, collaboration opportunities, or to share your own experiential learning story, please visit ALIGN or reach out to us at align@iu.edu.

Bloomington

Serve IT – Spring 2025

The Serve IT Clinic continued its mission of connecting Luddy students with community nonprofit organizations during the Spring 2025 semester, giving students the opportunity to apply their technical skills in meaningful, real-world contexts. Through a series of courses that combine Community Engaged Learning with professional development, students advanced their knowledge of project management, client relations, and teamwork while delivering valuable technology solutions to local partners

A total of 83 students participated this semester. Forty served as Informatics Capstone students or returning Computer Science team leads, guiding projects and supporting teams. All students worked directly with clients from nonprofit agencies, co-creating solutions tailored to each organization’s needs. Projects spanned a wide variety of focus areas. Students led technology education workshops with Boys and Girls Club sites across Lincoln Street, Crestmont, and Ellettsville, as well as with Edgewood Junior High’s Coding Club and Meadowood Retirement Community. Other teams provided digital accessibility assessments for organizations such as Washington Community Schools, People and Animal Learning Services (PALS), and the Bloomington Chamber. Several groups engaged with Indiana Phenology, including a business analysis and data visualization team and a website team working to publish the dashboards.

Other teams focused on website design, development, and security for organizations including Cubamistad, Stonebelt, Feral Cat Friends, and the Odon Business Alliance.

Feedback from community partners highlighted the program’s impact. Clients reported strong satisfaction with Serve IT’s work, noting that new websites improved their ability to interface with the public and that training and documentation provided by student teams supported long-term usability.

One partner reached out after working with teams, writing, “I've worked with numerous student groups and service-learning courses over the last 5 years. Your students are the most professional, well-organized, and prepared of any student group I've ever interacted with!”

Another partner from a local school said of her Teach IT Team Leads, “they are communicative, responsive, and have worked to build relationships with our students to ensure their experience is tailored and meaningful.”

Beyond direct service projects, Serve IT expanded its Industry Mentorship Program with Deloitte, launched in Fall 2023. Each student team is paired with a Deloitte mentor, while professionals from the firm provide regular development talks on topics such as “Life After Luddy,” “Soft and Hard Skills in Consulting,” and “Emerging Technologies in Consulting.” Additional alumni speakers from organizations like Liberty Mutual, Cisco, Target, and Dish Network also shared career insights, further strengthening the bridge between classroom learning and industry readiness.

The Spring 2025 Serve IT cohort demonstrated the power of experiential learning at Luddy—students built critical skills in communication, collaboration, problem-solving, and ethics while delivering technology solutions that nonprofits can carry forward long after the semester ends.

A teacher helping students with a project in a classroom.

The Teach IT Team Leads are communicative, responsive, and have worked to build relationships with our students to ensure their experience is tailored and meaningful.

Shoemaker Innovation Center

InnoQuest and Pitch-athon

Over the course of the academic year, graduate student inventors in the InnoQuest program collaborated with undergraduate product developers through the Pitch-athon, creating a unique pipeline that connected innovation with commercialization. Together, these programs fostered opportunities for students to refine their ideas, sharpen their communication skills, and test their ability to persuade audiences about the value of a technological innovation or product.

More than 60 graduate Luddy students engaged in InnoQuest, working to articulate and advance their inventions. Meanwhile, approximately 40 undergraduate students from Luddy and Kelley participated in the Pitch-athon, bringing product development perspectives to the table. This dynamic created a natural bridge between research-driven innovation and market-focused development, allowing students to see how early-stage concepts can be positioned for real-world application.

The initiative was strengthened by collaborations with IU Innovates, Paragraph, and Ice Miller, who provided both mentorship and resources. A highlight of the year came when students from both programs competed for scholarships, made possible through generous gifts from Brad Wisler of Paragraph, Dustin DuBois of Ice Miller, and Donna and John Shoemaker.

By the end of the year, participants had not only improved their presentation skills but had also gained confidence in building compelling arguments for their work and navigating the complex terrain between innovation and entrepreneurship. The Shoemaker Innovation Center’s continued support of these programs underscores its role as a hub for experiential learning, preparing students to carry their ideas beyond the classroom.

Indianapolis

Piloting a Common Open Source Data Warehouse for Community-Based Organizations

During the 2024–2025 academic year, Zeyana Hamid (BMEI) led a pioneering project that connected Luddy students with community partners to explore the use of DHIS2, an open-source system designed for health data management. The project piloted a common data warehouse model for community-based organizations, focusing on analytics, decision-making, and data exchange.

A total of 26 students engaged across multiple development tracks. Teams worked on database creation, system interoperability, decision-support analysis, machine learning, and dashboard development using PowerBI. One student partnered with Hamid to generate synthetic datasets that retained the statistical integrity of real organizational data, enabling the creation of a teaching tool for future students. This blend of technical development and pedagogical innovation demonstrated how experiential projects can feed directly back into the curriculum.

The initiative was made possible through collaborations with the Community Care Partnership of Missouri, which hired ten students, and the Wellness Center in Indianapolis, which helped establish a broader Indiana partnership. These organizations often lack technical development and analytics capacity, making the students’ contributions both practical and transformative.

Outcomes extended beyond the classroom. Students presented their work at capstone showcases, and three prepared poster submissions. Faculty research and project results have been accepted for presentation at several international venues, including the DHIS2 Symposium in Washington, D.C. (February 2025), the IU Assessment Institute in Bangkok, and the DHIS2 Annual Conference at Oslo University (June 2025).

For students, the experience provided invaluable skills in population health analytics, system development, leadership, and decision-making communication. Perhaps most importantly, the project introduced them to a global open-source system not yet widely implemented in the United States, positioning them—and Luddy itself—at the forefront of innovation in health data infrastructure.