One of the goals of IAJES agreed in the meeting at Cali, Colombia in 2019 is to encourage the collaboration and learning among students at Jesuit universities. To do so, a working group was created with the goal of proposing student projects aimed to promote collaborative work and learning among them. These projects are not competitions, so there are no winners or losers. The projects are opportunities to tackle an engineering issue and solve it in a collaborative way.
The first challenge was carried out on June 2021 and consisted of building a 3D-printed plastic part able to hold a maximum force/weight and force/manufacturing time before touching a defined obstacle. The rules of the challenge can be found in the following link: https://meaagg.com/IAJES/IAJES.html#Challenge
Each university was able to participate without any cost as the students sent the digital files to 3D print and test the parts at IQS Barcelona. After the first round of testing, IQS sent feedback to the students to define a second round.
In this first challenge participated student teams from India and IQS in Barcelona. The results were presented at the IAJES meeting in Boston 2022, where it was decided to propose a new challenge where more universities would be involved. A group of professors from at least 5 different universities was assembled in Boston to propose a second challenge and encourage their students to participate. Currently, Boston College USA, Santa Clara USA, UCA El Salvador, Iteso Mexico, Javeriana Colombia, Deusto Spain, Loyola Andalucia Spain, and IQS Spain are participating in the creation of the second collaborative challenge. This project will consist of two phases, in the first phase each university will propose and test a solution for the challenge locally and then will share the results among all universities, so in the second phase a common solution will be developed, where we put in value what we learn from other IAJES universities. The preliminary idea for the second challenge is to use cheap electronics such as Arduino and parts manufactured by 3D printers to develop laboratory equipment to teach Physics at the high school level.
If you are interested in this collaborative project, please email: [email protected]
If you want to know more about IAJES, you can visit its website: https://www.iajes.org/