KEENzine5

ZONES: ■ Blank Regions = No Construction in these zones. ■ Each grid spacing is equal to ten meters. ■ You cannot build on the beach or in the dense vegetation as the anchors will not hold in the sand and the vegetation will tangle the cables. 1 There are small gas pockets in this region. There is a 5 percent chance that while drilling for the anchor that a gas pocket could be breached. If breached, there would be a $15,000 clean-up cost. However, if a gas pocket is not breached, there is a construction cost of $500. If you pick this location, you will have to pay a $5,000 deposit to begin to cover costs in the event you hit a gas pocket. You must justify this deposit and additional risk to your investors. Building at the site incurs a social impact score of -4 for putting the community at potentially elevated risks. 2 In this zone, there is a rhinoceros migration route. There is a low cost for construction in this zone, however, for intruding on the migration route, there is a -3 social score. 3 The community is planning on building a school in this zone. There is an alternate school location in zone 8. If the cable is placed in zone 3, and the school is placed in zone 8, then 1 in 500 students will get so sick from the swamp gasses coming from zone 5 that they will not be able to attend school. 4 In this zone, there are no construction costs as there is a government subsidy to build in this area. However, there is a 10 percent chance that you will encounter a religious burial ground at this zone. If you build here, you will have to pay $500 to relocate the remains if they are found and you will incur a -6 social score. 5 This zone is swampy lands. Development of this site would release 20k tonnes of CO 2 . 6 This zone is privately owned land. You must pay the land owner for land use. By developing this land, the owner will be able to use the money to start a local business that will employ two community members. 7 This zone is a swampy region that has an infestation of mosquitoes. Construction on this land would reduce the mosquito population and help reduce disease in the region. 8 This zone would provide an alternative school site. Either zone 8 or zone 3 must be left undeveloped for the school. Each team then develops two different cable-anchoring systems and chooses one to pitch to the community. They present their final designs to the “fictional community” through a digital poster and a short persuasive essay. Projects tend to fall into one of two schools of thought when choosing between the two anchor designs: 1) A higher social impact score outweighs the necessity for a shorter payback time on the balloon investment. One team wrote, “Even though this option might cost more for your community, the social benefits are well worthwhile.” 2) The payback time should be minimized so that the village is more likely to purchase the turbine and receive the benefits of having power in their village. Another team wrote, “It is the money that makes the first design better than the second design. The extra $100 per day means the community will be debt free much quicker and will also bring more capital into the economy.” While there is no right answer, teams with either viewpoint evaluate the impact that their decisions would have on the village. Debating the importance of different types of social impact while simultaneously solving design challenges gives students the chance to engage with a larger social system and at the same time, learn fundamental engineering skills. After the first implementation of the project, I shared the course content with professor Glenn Gaudette for use in his statics course. He worked with professors Curtis Abel and Leslie Dodson to enhance the project by adding a stakeholder analysis so that students practice seeing the infrastructure frommultiple perspectives and delve more deeply into how their decisions affect the people within the community. The process of content sharing and exchange of ideas between instructors gives students the benefit of multiple project designers, further enriching the project experience. Iterating between instructors proved to be even more beneficial than I anticipated. In addition to providing students with improved content, we as instructors get to learn from each other’s wealth of knowledge and teaching styles. I would like to thank The Kern Family Foundation for supporting the making of this EML assignment and the collaborative KEEN team at WPI of Glenn Gaudette, Curtis Abel, Leslie Dodson, and John Sullivan. I would also like to thank the Teagle Foundation and professor Bethel Eddy for their support during the project development. SarahWodin-Schwartz 48