Offering engineering students global perspective through experiential learning project in wind energy and sustainability

Students from Princeton University partnered with students from the American University in Cairo in a three-week intensive hands-on field experience in Egypt. The project was to assemble, install and test a wind mill driven pump used for irrigation and to survey communities across Egypt in the Delta and Red Sea coast to assess water needs in these communities. The course offered a perspective on sustainable development in Egypt followed by water and energy resource challenges in Egypt’s diverse geographic areas. Students assembled a wind pump and installed it at the American University in Cairo for testing prior to installation at El Heiz, a desert oasis community in the Western Desert. The students were selected from diverse backgrounds in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Computer Engineering, and Operations Research and Financial Engineering and learned the value of having diverse teams address engineering problems in a truly global context. This paper presents the case study including lessons learned in implementation of this experiential learning field project.