Dear KU Engineering Alumni and Friends,

Thank you so much for your generous donations so far.  Check out our video of our IHAWKe-a-Thon event.

We have made connections with the KIPP Academy in Houston and a STEM non-profit in Puerto Rico who want us to come visit to learn more about how we can build engineering prototypes to help hurricane victims there.

Will you please help us by sharing this video with others?

Sincerely,

IHAWKe students 

Where do you start when you want to change the way victims can respond to hurricane disasters?  We, the IHAWKe students at KU, started with human-centered engineering, or design thinking, to learn to innovate in interdisciplinary engineering teams for real world situations.

This past month, over 40 students (including over 50% women) from our KU NSBE, SHPE, AISES, and SWE organizations gathered for an overnight engineering competition to design a new product experience for victims of hurricane disasters.  It is part of our reimagined engineering and diversity programs, IHAWKe (Indigenous, Hispanic, African-American, Women, KU Engineering).  The theme of IHAWKe is for our students to Change the World, Connect with Others, and Conquer their Classes.

Our IHAWKe students spent the entire night, until 5am, before hitting it again at 8am to design ways to help hurricane victims.  We began by developing empathy for hurricane victims by interviewing those that have been victims of hurricanes, power outages, accidents and other traumatic events.

The ideas we came up with were unique.  We have begun an iteration of another set of design prototypes in the IHAWKe Lab at the KU School of Engineering. And now we are raising money to do even more fact and need finding and prototyping in places that were hit including Florida, Texas, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands.  Will you help us?  If so, please donate even a small amount to the IHAWKe LaunchKU Crowdfunding page.

For those of you that have already donated, thank you very much!

For pictures, see our blog post.