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The BlueBox Project — Practicum in International Development

Creighton University

ProjectAug 2026 – Dec 2026Santiago de los Caballeros, Dominican Republic

A semester-long interdisciplinary practicum built around the BlueBox, a Raspberry Pi server that delivers educational content to schools without reliable internet. On the technology track I do two things: configure the unit that travels to the Dominican Republic in October, and build a new module of my own for it, an introductory data analysis site in Spanish.

Results

  • Offline server built and validated locally

    A Raspberry Pi running Linux, holding educational modules in a local database and serving them over its own network with no internet connection.

  • First prototype of the data module built

    Three tabs, one teaching dataset of fifteen fictional students, and scatterplots and bar charts with filtering and an optional line of best fit.

The problem

Partner schools have limited or no internet, so free online content never reaches them. The BlueBox stores it locally and serves it over its own Wi-Fi network, to whatever a student already has in hand: a phone, a tablet, a laptop. The hard part is not the content. It is the configuration, and keeping the box working for people who did not build it.

Overview

The part that is mine is a new data module for the box, and it is the one thing the catalog does not already have. It is an interactive site in Spanish for high school students: pick a dataset, put variables on the axes, and build a scatterplot or a bar chart without writing any code. They can filter observations, compare averages and counts, and add a line of best fit. Three tabs: definitions, data and charts.

The first dataset is fifteen fictional students carrying class group, study hours, grades and anxiety. It is small on purpose. Some of those comparisons show a clear pattern and some do not, and noticing the difference is the part a chart tool on its own never teaches. The goal is reading data, not making charts.

The other half is the platform it runs on. The Pi runs headless, so everything happens over SSH: modules come down from Azure-hosted storage over rsync, get registered in MariaDB so the box knows what it holds, and are served over Apache and Kiwix to anything on the local network. The catalog runs to roughly 35 Spanish-language modules. The box travels to the Dominican Republic from October 10 to 17 for interviews with teachers and students, and the prototype is what makes those conversations concrete.

Gallery(2)

  • The wireframe I drew in draw.io for the module site.
  • Assembling a Raspberry Pi computer.

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Aug 2026 – Dec 2026