Students Combine Technology, Policy for Public Service Solutions

“You’re encouraged to not think of a solution so that you don’t get ahead of yourself before you understand the problem better,” said Sam Szyperski, a marketing student who graduated with a BS in Business Administration and a minor in engineering sciences in autumn 2022. His team, “Top Gun,” worked on a project for the Ohio Department of Transportation’s FlyOhio initiative. “The class loves to use the term wicked problems; by the end, you understand why it’s called that because you took five or so weeks to understand what the problem was.”

In this course, students find solutions to challenges provided by a government agency or non-profit organization. They learn to use skills and tools such as human-centered design, which focuses on the human perspective to make systems usable and useful; storyboarding and workflow; and iterative design and prototyping.

“That’s why we teach students the principles and importance of human-centered design,” Rivera said. “Students can better understand the people at the heart of these wicked problems, what they need and their motivations in order to provide innovations that are more likely to be adopted and effective.”

DriveOhio, an initiative of the Ohio Department of Transportation and the state’s hub for smart mobility technology on the ground and in the air, has provided four projects for the course. Two recent challenges: supporting the growth of the advanced air mobility industry and addressing equity challenges to deploying electric vehicle charging stations.

“As transportation technologies rapidly evolve, they promise significant potential benefits to safety and mobility,” said Preeti Choudhary, executive director of DriveOhio. “Today’s students are critical to the innovative thinking required to identify solutions that apply this technology to real-world problems, and courses like this one encourage our future workforce to tackle these challenges head on.”

Szyperski’s team, “Top Gun,” also consisted of students in industrial systems engineering and public administration. They created FlyOhio Connect, an online forum and connection portal that collects industry information and data related to positive impacts advanced air mobility has on transportation goals and the community; connects service providers with users of the technology; and creates policy guidelines. FlyOhio is an initiative of DriveOhio.

“We didn’t start this project saying, ‘Let’s build a website,’” said Rich Granger, Ohio Department of Transportation managing director of workforce and economic development. “When you’re in the bubble, you’re not always able to think a little differently. Sometimes the fresh perspective of students and the energy they bring, and their creativity, is exactly what we need.”

“Through the process my team thought: There’s an abundance of information around this subject, but it is so scattered, whether that be what organization has which response in the industry, what the regulations are and what regulatory body applies to them,” Szyperski said. “How can we connect those industry leaders more effectively?”

His team had to interview about 50 people in the advanced air mobility industry, so they learned about professionalism and asking questions of experts in the field. He expects to apply the skills he developed in the course to his position as iGaming marketing and operations associate for DraftKings.

“The project subjects show you some of these pressing issues that personally I had never heard of before the class. It shows you how much work needs to be done,” Szyperski said. “From an engineer’s perspective, that would excite me and show there’s a lot of opportunity in small problems that have so many people working on them because they are wicked problems.”
Granger credits the interdisciplinary aspect of the Rapid Innovation course as one key to its success.

“You’ve got engineering, policy, business and marketing,” Granger said. “We had little of all of that on this team, and it shows.”

For the Ohio Department of Transportation’s DriveOhio program, the student “Electric Vehicle Buckeyes” team developed a case study survey to collect information from rural community members working in development, planning and sustainable energy; a communications strategy; and a rural stakeholder contact list.

“It’s arguable that rural communities have been left out of vehicle electrification, the grid and fiber optics, so they’re going to fall behind if they’re not specifically considered,” said team member Megan McCarthy, who expects to graduate this fall with a BS in Public Policy Analysis with a minor in engineering sciences. 

“The class is very unique in being able to offer that connection between the two,” said McCarthy, who was the innovation intern for DriveOhio this summer.

“The course itself is just a real gem,” Granger said. “To me it’s one of the best experiences that an industry or employer can have in sponsoring a project on campus.”

Read the latest edition of Public Address, the Glenn College magazine.