Urban Farming in Myanmar: An Experiential Learning Project for Engineering and Science Students from Hong Kong and Myanmar

Abstract

Urban farming as enhanced by the latest cloud computing and Internet of Things (IoT) technologies may possibly give a promising direction to solve the global issue of food crisis. This work-in-progress paper describes a group of 13 Engineering students from the University of Hong Kong (HKU) working closely with 35 Science students from the Dagon University (DU) in Myanmar through an experiential project to investigate thoroughly on the challenging topic of urban farming with a number of carefully designed field trips, seminars, training workshops and other interesting activities. To ensure a more fruitful inter-disciplinary collaboration between students from 2 different cities, the Engineering students have designed and implemented by themselves 6 sets of IoT devices potentially used for urban farming to share their professional knowledge and experience with the Science students in Myanmar. On the other hand, the Science students gave presentations and also guided various field trips for site installation and testing of the IoT devices. More importantly, to critically evaluate the possible impacts of experiential learning, a debriefing session will be conducted on both individual and group basis at the end of each day. Furthermore, both DU and HKU students will try to explore new and potential Engineering problems by themselves in the city of Yangon for further investigation in the upcoming years.