Wastewater treatment in Myanmar: A multidisciplinary learning experience for engineering and science students from two countries

Abstract

The ever changing technology landscape is driving engineering education to become increasingly global, cross-disciplinary, and collaborative in nature everywhere. Besides delivering technical knowledge in classroom, a comprehensive engineering curriculum must also engage students in practical learning experiences that place equal emphasize on professional skills training including teamwork, lifelong learning and social responsibility. These are traits that form the core competencies for not only professional engineers but also entrepreneurs. Sharing the above vision, a group of engineers and scientists from University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong and Dagon University in Yangon, Myanmar embarked on a cross-country and cross-disciplinary experiential learning project to work on one of the major environmental sustainability issues of the 21st century - wastewater treatment. In this reported pilot programme, 16 engineering students from University of Hong Kong travelled to Myanmar for a weeklong programme where they worked with 40 students from Dagon University to study wastewater quality at Yangon, Myanmar. This project has enriched students' understanding on the importance of water, sanitation, and hygiene as keys to national development. They also experienced first-hand how engineering and science professionals can work together in developing solutions with real-world impact in wastewater treatment. Students from both universities collaborated in teams to design, develop, and deploy an experiment to examine the wastewater condition in Myanmar. Engineering students took the lead on the development of technologies (e.g. implementation of Arduino-based remote data sensing and cloud-based database) to measure and report the biochemical oxygen demand (BOD) in wastewater samples, which is commonly used as an indicator of the degree of organic pollution of wastewater. Science students took the lead on the wastewater sample collections, the experimental design and the reporting of the results beyond the project time frame. In this paper, we report the design and delivery of the experiential learning project, the teaching and learning activities, the learning outcomes, as well as the evaluation results on the effectiveness of this project on professional skills training such as lifelong-learning skills, teamwork skills and global citizenship.