An Engineering Design Workshop for Appropriate Technology with the People in Need

About An Engineering Design Workshop for Appropriate Technology with the People in Need

Abstract

Since 2008, in Korea, the Handong Innovation Center for Engineering Education (HICEE) and the Korean Christian Forum in Science and Engineering (CFSE) hold a national engineering design workshop for college students every summer, which is called “Engineering Design Academy for the Other 90%.” The purpose of this workshop is to equip Korean college students with the mindset for the social responsibility of technology, especially for appropriate technologies and practical design skills for the poor people in the world who do not get the benefits of the modern science and technologies. In this paper, we propose a new model for the engineering design workshops where the students work on the very realistic problems explained by the actual clients directly from the developing counties.. In the third Engineering Design Academy, 2010 summer, we had 20 persons from developing countries as clients who were invited for leadership training at the Canaan Farmers School, Wonju, Korea. The participating students showed more activeness and the design workshop become more livelier when the students get the information about the problem and the feedback opinions for the students solution directly from the clients. Survey results from the academy showed that 79% of the students evaluated the role of clients very positively.