Poster Q14 - The Role of Cultural Diversity for Promoting Creativity in Engineering - A Collaborative Workshop During International Travel to Tanzania

Introduction: Collaboration between different disciplines of engineering and fields of science have been touted for the past 10+ years as the best way to prepare students for the collaborative efforts that are seen in real world engineering in industry. During that time, many engineering departments in American institutions have done a lot of work to promote and facilitate cooperation between different departments in their universities. More recently, there has been a bigger push to create collaboration between departments outside their own institutions, for example by having the electrical engineering department at one university work with the mechanical engineering department of a different nearby university. Due to the expanding globalization of industries and the current focus on cultural diversity, it is not unexpected that a lot of institutions have started to move towards promoting global collaboration between different disciplines of engineering.
This research group led by Dr. Delphine Dean from the Bioengineering Department of Clemson University in South Carolina, USA, has been working with the Electrical Engineering Department from Arusha Technical College (ATC) in Arusha, Tanzania, to encourage the exchange of ideas between two very different groups of students. This abstract focuses on the education and cultural exchange outcomes of one particular workshop during the latest Clemson Bioengineering Department’s trip to Tanzania for a symposium.

Materials and

Methods: This workshop was held during the second day of a week-long symposium. This particular group of students included 10 Clemson Bioengineering undergraduates, 2 Clemson Bioengineering graduate students (one in the MS program and one in the PhD program), and 13 biomedical engineering bachelor’s students from ATC. The panel of judges was composed of one Bioengineering PhD student from Clemson, one Computer Science professor from Clemson, and two Electrical Engineering/Biomedical Engineering faculty members from ATC.
The students were divided into 4 groups with an even mix of Clemson and ATC students, and the two graduate students separated to ensure fairness. The students were given an hour and 25 minutes to create to the best of their ability, a plan for fabricating a vaccine transport system to be used on motorcycle couriers to transport for 4 hours from Dar es Salaam, the main commerce city of Tanzania, to a small village between Dar es Salaam and Arusha. Multiple constraints were given, namely that their solution must be able to be fabricated at the main ATC campus using materials available within the city, but the prompt was left mostly open-ended to promote creative solutions. Once the time was done, the students were asked to present their plans and ideas to the entire group and the judges as a poster. The judging was originally going to be based on feasibility, creativity, and presentation flair in order of 1-4, but ended up being changed on-the-fly as will be discussed in the Results section.

Results, Conclusions, and Discussions: During the work time, the main planner for this event (who is also the presenting author) observed the work of the students. It was observed that the relatively large groups of 6-8 students were split into small subgroups working on different parts of the solution. The largest group (8 students) split itself down culture lines, the ATC students working on logistics and creating the poster while the Clemson students worked on drawing the proposed device. The other slightly smaller groups also split themselves into two subgroups but did not split down culture lines. This leads the researchers to conclude that larger groups promote working with people like yourself, though with such a small dataset this is not a statistically significant observation.
Once the students presented, the judges decided that there would be a change in judging criteria as one of the groups decided to use compressed nitrogen gas as the cooling source and a relatively complex design given the constraints. The incredible amount of engineering work was deemed to warrant some form of recognition, so it was decided to instead award two winners, one based on creativity and one based on feasibility (see figures 1 and 2). The variety of solutions can be traced to their diversity, as each group was able to use the ATC students’ local knowledge for manufacturing expertise as well as their electrical engineering knowledge, while the Clemson students have a materials-heavy curriculum. We hope to push this in the future by including participants from other disciplines, though this may be more difficult for the ATC side as Tanzanian culture values sticking to your expertise. However, at least one of the ATC biomedical students started the bachelors program with an associate in mechanical engineering as opposed to electrical engineering, meaning there is already some variety in disciplinary background. The Clemson side of the program includes student researchers from different departments, but none were able to attend this trip. In the future, the group plans to incentivize students from outside Bioengineering to join the program and especially to attend the symposium.

Acknowledgements (Optional): We would like to acknowledge funding from the Creative Inquiry undergraduate research program at Clemson University. We would also like to acknowledge non-author team-member Jeremiah Carpenter (who was not allowed to help with the planning for this specific workshop so he could participate) and the entire staff from the Electrical Engineering Department for making this trip possible in the first place.