Engineering our future - EDS Uniandes.

Working with children we noticed that in many cases they don't have access to engineering and technology knowledge. Sadly, it is a topic completely out of their context, which in some cases is full of poverty and violence.

Taking this into account, we started developing activities based in games to help them understand basic concepts of electronics. Addressing their social issues in these activities, we work with them as a group to propose ideas focused on solving these problems through technology. For example, we have developed prototypes for a motor based on renewable energies, or a system of acid rain detection.

Our solution can make a major impact in the lives of people in Latin America, as it is easy to implement in every corner of the continent, and it promotes teamwork and the development of systems that make an impact on social issues.

All our project arose when we noticed that almost no school in Colombia adressed the ability to solve a problem related to its members' context. It was a shocking experience when we started working with children from colombian public schools. Not only did they lack from information about current issues like the development of renewable energies, but also there was not a single person who wanted to be an engineer or a doctor. Almost every decision for their future was based on tv shows as Escobar.

Aware of how powerful an engineering ability can be, we started to change our activities approach. Focusing on creating systems to solve problems that have certain incidence in the lives of Colombian and Latin American students, our activities promote the generation of ideas from every member of the group.

As the university resources are not always available for these activities, our program can be implemented anywhere. It is easy to use, as it works like a LEGO game with technological components. Another contributing factor is that the program promotes teamwork, a very important skill in a world in which we go further by helping each other.

The population whose lives we are working with is specifically the neighborhood Fenicia, some schools around this area, and some other from low economic strata such as Kennedy neighborhood, located in Bogota. We are working with them to understand their needs by bringing electronics basic knowledge closer to them, and we focus this experience in order to think about and propose solutions for some of our society’s issues. We also encourage them to share their thoughs about electronics, as well as their different experiences through school. Additionally, our intention is to turn these ideas into real implementations. We are doing this by the constant development of electronic devices (in a small scale) that potentially could be the basis of a solution to several of the addressed issues in the society.

Our solution involves all the physical components and activities related to the relation that we pretend to build between children and engineering. The basic physical element used in our activities is called Snap Kit. It consist of modular pieces that can be joined like LEGOs. As it has only basic pieces, that sometimes are not enough to develop the ideas proposed by our students, we want to develop several modules that can be integrated to the Kit, related with the measurement of physical variables like temperature, humidity or light. These measured variables would be processed in an Arduino, and published in a web server through a ESP8266 microcontroler, which makes this task easy as it has a TCP/IP stac integrated. We have explored this through a prototype, in which the microcontroler generates a Wi-Fi network that can be used as a server for any device to visit the web page. This we page is composed by graphs representing the measured physical variable in real time. Also, the web page is interactive, as the user can choose the graph that he/she wants to see.

The implementation of this element would geatly help the development of our work with the children communities. The Snap Kits that we currently use for the activities have only basic components, like lights and motors. The introduction of an element like the one we are developing would help the user to comprehend more complex concepts, and to develop more elaborate prototypes. 

We currently serve a population of 34 children. These children belong to 2 public schools in Bogotá and the Fenicia neighborhood, the neighborhood where the Universidad de los Andes is located. Within a year, schools and foundations in Colombia are expected to learn about our solution and begin to use the kits to educate their children and youth in science. We hope that our team continues with a population of approximately the same children, but that outside of our group the kits will reach more than 1,000 people. Finally, in five years we propose, (bearing in mind that in Colombia there are 12 million children between 5 and 19 years old, and 27% of the population is low-income), to serve 300,000 children and youth in Colombia. 

Statistics obtained from DANE data, National Administrative Department of Statistics (Colombia). https://www.dane.gov.co

In 5 years, we want to have helped several low resources communities to solve their own problems with solutions based on technology, giving them the tools and abilities to keep solving several issues through technology.

First, the economic situation. Our team is made up of young university students who do not receive a salary. This is why we want to work on a low-cost solution in order to advance the prototypes while there are no sources of financing.

There is also a political barrier in which the Colombian educational system does not want to implement this alternative, however beneficial it may be. In our experience as students, we all agree that education in Colombia has not changed much in recent years, so trying to make a change is difficult. It is necessary that schools, as the main promoters of education, agree to be part of our solution

The economic issue can be covered in the design phase. It is necessary to find financing to replicate the devices and thus bring them to a greater number of people. Anyway, our team works on making a very low cost design and we consider making a 'Free Source' product to be open to other professional perspectives and thus not make mistakes that involve expenses.

On the other hand, the second barrier described is faced by making known the success of the programs we are carrying out and their influence on the academic process of children and young people. In this way, we have an indicator of how much our solution benefits in schools and educational foundations that focus on STEM education

We are a group of 15 people, being 10 of them undergraduate students. We also have 2 graduate students, 1 doctoral student and a professor in our team. 

Because we are a multidisciplinary team very interested in helping low-resources communities develop a strong bond with engineering. Most of use are electronic and systems engineers, with the skills to develop the physical components we are planning to implement, ant to share technical knowledge to children. On the other hand, we have several members who come from other disciplines, and help our group build a more complete program.

We would win in two aspects. Firstly, the economic help would help us develop a final product based on the prototype we have designed. On the other hand, it would help us to expand the project. As we are a university group, our work is only known in the university. With the support of TPrize, we could develop the program in a bigger scale, as we would be known by more organizations. This implies we could reach and make an impact in more comminities, which is the ultimate goal.