Engineering Marks 5th Year in Choluteca, Honduras

This past May, Dr. Roger Dzwonczyk and Ph.D. student Mariant Gutierrez Soto accompanied eight (8) engineering students to Choluteca, Honduras where they spent two (2) weeks implementing projects they had been designing on campus throughout the Spring Semester.

Their home-away-from-home was a humble place in Siete de Mayo - a rural community with a need for proper access to water and healthcare.

Working closely with their resident directors and the community's leaders, the students designed and implemented the following three (3) projects:

 

1. Project Frio: focused on developing a way to cool insulin.

 

2. Salud Movil: a mobile health technology that allows for wound area calculation for diabetic patients.

 

3. Clean Water Initiative: focused on water testing to identify contaminants and GIS mapping of the water resources. 

A vital component of each of these projects was that the students actively engage with the community to learn its needs and gauge the utility of their design solutions.  Students had to also account for the challenge that all the materials necessary to their designs had to be locally available and low-cost.

Students gained invaluable lessons in designing solutions to real-world problems, overcoming unforeseen implementation challenges, and engineering in the service of others.

For the past two years, the resident directors have asked the students participating in this program to describe their experience in three words. Using these words, they created the following word cloud to summarize this transformative international engineering experience.