Hi Natalia—What an interesting and relevant project. How much time did the students from the two schools spend together? Was this supplemented by virtual engagement? How long did the project continue?

Exchanging ideas and solving problems through Smart Cities is a great way to enhance learning across borders. Can you give us a few examples of the specific projects students are tackling? What role does faculty play in the process? How are city leaders involved in the work? What kinds of research and collaboration seem to generate the most engagement? What would you say are the most significant outcomes from the collaborations so far? Biggest challenges?

These are all great questions, Vivian. Thank you.
Students are working on specific projects in the areas of Smart Mobility, Smart Buildings and Smart Health Care. Their initial ideas include using technology (apps) to improve mobility of disabled people by coordinating volunteer carpooling, and detecting and fixing water leaks in buildings.
Faculty worked together for about 4-5 months in identifying challenges in both cities, Guadalajara and El Paso, engaging city decision-makers in the process.
The Faculty team created a customized set of lectures and workshops for the students so they can learn the skills needed to tackle the challenges identified in advance.
The hardest and more challenging part is to create interdisciplinary, international team of students. Students have been amazingly productive at contributing their perspectives and respecting teammate’s perspectives. The generation of diverse and new ideas has been incredible.
We have also engaged industry and students will present their projects at a hackathon, which is a two-day event where people gather to generate software programs for a specific application. The Smart Cities hackathon is led by our industry partner IBM and will coincide with the gathering of our students in Guadalajara.

Thank you Natalia for sharing this great collaboration between UTEP and UDG. I was wondering how K-12 schools relate to the Smart Cities work so far?

Exciting!
Does your “inter discipline” reach outside engineering to include, for example, public health students, media students, ecologists, or others who might contribute useful expertise in design and education about their ideas?

It is always great to see collaborative project-based learning in action. Can you tell us more about what specific STEM or CS skills students in this program are learning? Did the faculty know in advance what skills would be needed or was this determined after the project scope was defined by individual student teams? In my own experience I have found it challenging to lead interdisciplinary teams when one student is very familiar with a software or tool (e.g. EXCEL) and others are not. How do you manage the time and resources it takes to deal with these individual differences across learners? And on that note… without NSF funding how do you imagine you could keep a resource intensive project like this running? I ask because we are trying to do something similar here at UC Santa Cruz.