Engaging Learners in the Collaborative Design of Sustainable Smart Cities

During the last few years, more researchers and educators have proposed workshops to familiarize learners with concepts based on smart cities, such as smart object design and autonomous vehicles. The designing process is demanding, as it requires exploring sensors and actuators that behave as activators of smart city design, but also ideate, program, and prototype new solutions to enhance smart city features. While workshops usually are based on educational boards and block-based programming environments, this paper reports on the design of an in-person workshop, which aims at engaging high-school and university learners across the entire design process of sustainable smart city solutions while exploiting professional technologies and components like that of STMicroelectronics and FBK. An engagement questionnaire was administered online after the workshop to understand whether participants considered the proposed workshop enjoyable and easy to follow and how learners perceived the aspect of collaboration during smart city workshops. According to the results, participants are highly engaged in designing sustainable smart city solutions taking advantage of groups to share ideas and distribute the load.