**3. Case studies of applying low-cost technologies in low-resource communities**

Each of the subsections in this section focus on a particular application area framed by the UN Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs). The specific goals to be addressed here are:


#### **3.1 Enhancing the quality of education in low resource settings (UN SDG Goal 4)**

#### *3.1.1 Raspberry Pi workshops at Landivar University in Guatemala*

The quality of education in rural communities is often very limited for many reasons including lack of trained teachers, lack of funding for the schools, and lack of technologies in the classrooms (including lack of connectivity). In 2009, World Possible, curated a package of creative commons resources (such as Wikipedia, Khan Academy, CK12 textbooks, etc.) for offline distribution to communities that lacked internet access [17] The organization coupled the content with the open-source web browser, Google Chrome, and created the Remote Area Community Hotspots for Education and Learning (RACHEL). They established this platform on the Raspberry Pi Model 3 and named it the Rachel Pi. The educational content stored in the unit's memory or on the micro-SD card could be accessed by computers, tablets or smart phones through a wireless router. Content on this device has been further developed in local contexts by local developers. A good example of this is the work done in Guatemala by Israel Quic, a native Mayan who produced materials based on his Mayan heritage in various Mayan languages for the local communities [18].

The Rachel Pi has been deployed all over the world from Tunisia, to Uganda to Papua New Guinea [19, 20]. A specific example is described in more detail next.

Landivar University is a Catholic, Jesuit university which has a campus in Quetzaltenango, Guatemala. The university is well-established and its professors in the Computer Science Department have a reasonably good curriculum including elective topics at a very basic level in the areas of artificial intelligence and Blockchain. The Arduino microcontroller is used in some project work at the university but only to a limited extent. However, the students and professors had not received any exposure to the Raspberry Pi until the author and his students conducted workshops at the university. Students at the university have access to laptop computers and the classrooms are well equipped with projectors and screens.

#### *Using ICT and Energy Technologies for Improving Global Engineering Education DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.100097*

On the other hand, the region around the town of Quetzaltenango is very poor. Much of the population in the region is indigenous Mayan people who predominantly speak Quechua. The schools in the region of Totonicapan rarely have computer labs and many of them have no access to the Internet, although most of them do have access to electricity. The teachers also have limited technical skills. Catholic Relief Services (CRS) has been supporting a bilingual education program (in Quechua and Spanish) at the schools through a food and nutrition program as well as an infrastructure program (primarily building kitchens and latrines at the schools). The author and his students delivered two workshops on the Raspberry Pi to computer science students and professors at Landivar University in May 2019 and November 2019. Each workshop was held for two days. The first workshop provided an orientation to the Raspberry Pi and the second workshop was a more advanced workshop on configuring the Raspberry Pi for setting up a network and sharing resources from a server to individual computers.

The team from Landivar University working in partnership with a software engineer from CRS were able to obtain funding from the IEEE Humanitarian Activities Committee (IEEE HAC) [21] to establish a computer laboratory in a remote school in the community of Santa Maria Chiquimula in Totonicapan, Guatemala. This system was configured and deployed by the computer science students in early 2020 but because of the COVID-19 situation, has not been accessible to students and teachers at the school because the schools in the region have been closed since then. A photograph showing the students in the computer laboratory in early March 2020 as it was being set up is shown in **Figure 6**.

This example shows how a group of motivated university students in a low resource setting were able to address a local social challenge around the quality of education being delivered to school children in a remote, poor rural community.

A qualitative assessment of the November 2019 workshop on the Raspberry Pi was conducted. Two main questions were asked: What were the positive aspects of the workshop and what were the negative aspects of the workshop? The students indicated that they really enjoyed the practical, hands-on aspects of the workshop and the negative comment was simply that they wish the workshop had been longer!
