Sustainability Challenges & the Opportunities for Global Engagement: Linking Caribbean secondary school classrooms and Engineering Departments at US Universities

Sustainability is recognized as being critical for the framing of engineering research and education with unique opportunities for engineering student training through non-‐traditional university partnerships, including international ones. With limited natural resources, high vulnerability to catastrophic events, and isolated by the sea, Caribbean islands have been pushing for sustainable development and have championed adaptation as the main mechanism to deal with climate change. Actual demonstration projects or widespread educational initiatives needed to solve issues such as water scarcity are limited and only a very small work force has training in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM). This paper discusses a secondary school student challenge that was developed in the Caribbean to address these issues with particular attention paid to Belize and the types of linkages that evolved with US based engineering students and the ways in which students in the Caribbean and the US were exposed to a global environment. Twenty-‐four projects entered the challenge from Belize, two of which were formally engaged with student classes from two different US universities. A teacher and 5 students from a private secondary school in Caye Caulker, a Belizean island, were matched with a mentor at a US University. That mentor required the twenty students in his senior level Geospatial Technologies for Biosystems Engineering class to work on the Belize request to design a composting system based on material, financial, and local environmental constraints. Teams of two or three university students worked with the teacher and students from Belize and presented their findings via SKYPE and as a written report. While being mentored by a local Belizean engineer on a stormwater management project for their school in Belize City, connections were made to a Professor of Civil Engineering at another US university who focused her International Engineering Field Experience course on their project. In May 2013, thirteen students from her class visited Belize to survey the site, teaching survey methods to the secondary school students as well. In May 2014, another group will visit to continue working on the project, which involves the creation of a detention pond and an ecological park for outdoor laboratory experiments.