BLUElab Sa'Nima' Collaborative

Our group will be traveling to Primavera, Guatemala, a community that we recently established a working partnership with, to gather feedback about our prototyped design for improved water storage in the community. This was a community-identified need in 2016, and Primavera has since reaffirmed this need our ongoing communications with them. The team's engineering project will be an individual water storage tank system to collect more water for our current partner family. The team is currently doing background research and benchmarking to begin product design generation at the beginning of next semester. Preliminary prototypes will be constructed throughout March and April to travel in May. Our team then plans to bring our prototype to community for feedback during the actual trip in Summer 2019. We plan to perform technical testing and in-community feasibility assessment to ensure the safety and appropriateness of our prototype in addressing the community's needs. We will also be conducting various workshops including engineering workshops to encourage the students to develop problem-solving skills and apply them to relevant problems that they see in their daily life. This trip would also serve as an avenue for us to strengthen our relationship with the local community, and allow new members of our student organization who have not traveled before to gain insight into the culture and values of our partnering community.