DALLAS — Scorching heat and extreme drought conditions continue crippling parts of North Texas.
That’s partly why some students in the Jubilee Park community of southeast Dallas are working on strategies to address water conservation and other neighborhood concerns.
A group of sixth through eighth graders are spending the week huddled in a classroom at Jubilee Park Community Center. They’re working alongside engineering students and teachers from Southern Methodist University as part of SMU’s Harmon Engineering Camp.
The students from Jubilee Park call themselves "Emerging Engineers". They’re working to build prototypes of water towers for their community.
This camp is the first time SMU is partnering with Jubilee Park to bring S.T.E.M. training in the community where the students live.
“All of our students here are students from the community. They know exactly what’s going on. But a lot of things, they are also finding out that there are some desert areas that are missing out in the schooling. For example, water management is one of the things we are talking about and what they’re learning,” said Karen Medina, education manager at Jubilee Park Community Center.
The goal of the camp is to expose the kids to all fields of engineering. The students in the camp are working on developing and designing a tower that could collect, filter and distribute water across a resource challenged community like their own.
“There’s incredible talent in these communities. We know that there’s funds of knowledge about their communities. They’re the experts at their communities,” said Alain Moto, program manager at SMU’s Caruth Institute for Engineering Education.
The mentors call the camp significant for training eager students and helping them find ways to solve problems. The campers believe it’s a great way to expose future engineers to the skills needed to potentially help make neighborhoods more sustainable.
“We want all of them to be engineers, scientists, or mathematicians, and technologists to help their own community and the entire City of Dallas,” said Mota.