JIA stands for Junior Ingenieur Akademie, or in English, Junior Engineering Academy. GESS is the first school outside of Europe that has been accepted into the esteemed Junior Engineer Academy network. The Junior Engineer Academy (JIA) was incepted by the Deutsche Telekom Foundation in 2005 with the goal of fostering interest in the technical and engineering sector among young students between the ages of 13 to 14. GESS students now get privileged access to the pool of engineering knowledge in Europe and can explore a future career in engineering.
The JIA project is coordinated by three committed educators, Iulius Carebia, Philipp Griebling and Roland Metzger, who are currently mentoring 23 students while they work on one of these three projects:
Tiny House
Students participating in this project are in their second JIA year and will complete their big project this year. They have been working tirelessly every Tuesday for about one and a half years. Currently, they are working on the completion of their long-term project, a sustainable Tiny House that is to be used as a classroom for tuition. With accent walls and folding furniture, the students have been able to implement unique touches into the design of the Tiny House.
The progress of design in this project was only possible thanks to a range of skills that were acquired in the first half of the JIA programme, which the team could then implement into the creation of the smart home. The first thing that the students had to learn was coding, along with wiring a Sensebox.
The planning, designing and building of the Tiny House is completely student-led, the teachers function as mentors who guide students if there are questions, but all decisions in terms of the building process are made by the students themselves.
Drone Taxi
All students participating in the Drone Taxi project received a drone kit from Pegasus AC who support and nurture students with an interest in aviation. This gives our students the opportunity to explore their interest in a career in engineering.
The Drone Kit contains all the materials the students need to build their drones including a Raspberry pi which is a small single-board computer that allows students to programme their drones. However, the part that was not included – intentionally of course – was the structure for the drone. Here, the students had to conceptualise, design and experiment to come up with a structure that would be both sturdy and light enough to fly with stability and balance. Once they completed their designs, the students used the 3-D printers in our well-equipped Design Technology Studios to print their drone structures. A lot of testing and flight attempts showed whether the structure had to be revised or whether it worked well. These different phases of research, building, testing, revising etc. give students a good insight into life as an engineer.
PC-Upcycling
Just like the Drone Taxi, students working on the PC-upcycling project also work in phases. In the first year they worked on micro-control heads, starting with transistors and working step-by-step towards micro-controllers. Currently, students are working on their own projects, all of which have to do with programming, but the students chose their own applications, e.g. a motion sensor for the room door, an apparatus that will automatically dispense cat food if the bowl is empty or a plant watering system. All of these little computers have to be programmed. Once the students complete their current projects, they will start building their own computers with Raspberry pis. Given that recycling of old or broken computers is becoming more and more difficult and rare, moving forward, this will be a great skill for students in a world where we are trying to live more sustainably.
I like working on a project that I have chosen myself and working together with my classmates.
Himangi
As you can see, all three projects are student-led. Students choose how they tackle a certain task, come up with their own designs and solutions. A good amount of programming and robotics is involved which will equip students with valuable knowledge once they enter the job market. Even if future jobs require different programming languages, a good foundation will certainly make the acquisition of new programming languages much easier. All projects provide our students with a realistic idea of what working as an engineer will look like. Engineers are not told in detail what to do. Instead, they are asked to design a solution for a problem, just like our students have to do in their projects. This is why the three coordinating teachers provide an overall framework for the projects but not fixed curriculum or task. Instead of having a fixed theoretical and a fixed practical part, learning happens organically, depending on what is needed during the different project stages. Students have the freedom to learn and grow with their tasks and projects, bring in their own ideas and projects. This might take longer, but has a much bigger impact as they take responsibility for their own independent learning. This includes working in teams and maybe sometimes it also means doing some research or programming at home.
Real-life application and future projects
While the three projects allow students to explore different skills and fields of engineering, they are united by the aim of working towards the 17 Sustainable Development Goals. All three projects have a real-life application and contribute to solving tomorrow’s problems.
The projects also do not just take place for the sake of having something to do, but serve as practice for actual tasks engineers in today’s world have to work on:
The Tiny House Project considers the fact that living spaces are getting smaller as people increasingly settle around urban areas and housing prices are going up.
The Drone Taxi is looking at moving transportation of deliveries from the 2-dimensional space on the roads to the 3-dimensional space by using the airspace in urban areas.
The PC-Upcycling project is addressing the need to curb a buy-and throw away-culture and instead seeks to re-use and repair things.
I like that we learn a lot of stuff, like right now we have been learning about sensors and I like that we get to have a project that helps us show everything we have learned and apply it to make something that can help us in the real world.
Stuti
Our JIA project is a future-oriented programme allowing students to look actively for solutions to the challenges in our modern world and provides them with opportunities to apply them independently and on their own.
We cannot wait for our next visit to the Design Technology Studio to discover future projects that our aspiring engineers will create and build!
