Engineering through Education- 2022

Over the course of two weeks in March and April 2022, WARC launched a pilot program called "Engineering through Education" in Karakalpakstan, Uzbekistan. Through this project, we worked with mainly high school students and some precocious middle schoolers from School 12 and School 41 in the village of Kegeyli. This community faces the brunt of the Aral Sea crisis: dirty and saline drinking water, dust storms and northern winds carrying salt that crystallises in clusters over the soil, and excessive heat and desert climate that makes farming a challenging endeavour. The core of the program was an environmental engineering curriculum, taught by volunteer engineers from Uzbekistan and the United States. The program culminated in a community-wide Science Fair, in which students showed off their projects to fellow students, teachers, community members, government officials, and local news channels, and were empowered to continue to monitor and test their solutions long after the program's culmination. 

Through hands-on exercises, students learned about the unique properties of water, calculated formulas for water transport and dynamics, put together sensors to measure temperature and humidity and built water filters out of plastic bottles. Students learned about water usage and statistics by filling out a daily worksheet designed to track daily and weekly water usage. Students learned about design thinking, the method by which engineers bring out implementable solutions from identified problems. Students discussed ecological issues directly facing their community and brainstormed small-scale engineering solutions to address these problems. With a budget of around $250 per project, the students were split into six groups to bring their ideas to life

As part of our curriculum, the students at School 12 and School 41 were responsible for filling in a daily worksheet that tracked how much water they used for different tasks on a weekly basis. Sustainability - Overall, the villagers of Kegeyli have a keen understanding of how much water they use. It is not that water waste is a problem, but rather that water is difficult to access, often dirty, and high in salinity.

Results:

• Students presented their prototypes at the Science Fair on the grounds of Kegeyli's School 12 on April 1.

• In Qonliqo’l we install a 500L/hour large reverse osmosis filter on the grounds of School 1.

• In Moynaq School 1, we led an eco-theatre lesson on the theme of developing solutions for local ecological challenges. 

• WARC provided clean drinking water to over 2,500 members of the communities in Kegeyli and Qonliqo'l.

• WARC presented the results of the program at a Forum at Tashkent Institute of Irrigation and Agricultural Mechanization Engineers on April 3.