World Student Community for Sustainable Development

On the Participation of Members of the Saint Petersburg Student Community for Sustainable Development in a Web-Based Collaborative Project

by Ann Bozhko

“Web-based Collaborative Engineering in Hydroscience” is an international course organized and performed in close cooperation between several partner universities in Germany, Hungary, France, The Netherlands, Russia, Latvia, Taiwan, the US, and other countries. Forum discussion Thread

Students from the partner universities form small teams (about eight members) to solve a river engineering problem on a Web-based project platform. The typical team is rather diverse; for example, a typical team may be composed of two participants form Budapest, three from Berlin, and three from Delft. This diversity of participants provides an international and interdisciplinary team composition. At each location, one supervisor ensures the local (technical) support. All supervisors are available for all course participants. In this way, all partners set up a “Virtual Institute” to overcome the spatial distribution and to run this common education course in the Internet. It may be a small but valuable step towards an international “Virtual University Water Environment: HydroLab.”

The idea of this course is simple: to simulate a hydroengineering project in a form of a “game,” which is performed by collaboration partners at different locations in a Web environment. Collaboration partners are students/experts from different universities/companies who strive for ensuring an interdisciplinary and international team composition. The teams are operating as independent units. The organizational structure, work plan, work distribution, and coordination inside the teams are defined by the team members themselves. This means that a team as a whole is responsible for the performance of the given engineering task without any instruction or influence from outside. Unlike in the real world, nobody can really lose such a game — the experience one gains, whether good or bad, is always profitable, especially considering what one learns from participation in such a project. By “playing” this game, the participants acquire knowledge, experience, and competence in Web-based collaborative engineering. In this way, they may become better prepared for future challenges: for example, to act on a global market in international and interdisciplinary project environments and companies.

In June of last year, 14 students from St. Petersburg State Politechnic University participated in this project, including me and Ekaterina Mushkina — both members of the Saint Petersburg SC-SD. My team consisted of nine members: three students from Greece, three from Germany and three from St. Petersburg. This event lasted two weeks. We communicated with our foreign partners by means of chat-meetings using web-cameras and microphones. Our task was to solve the technical problem in a special hydro engineering program and to prepare reports about our work. It was very difficult to work with students from different countries and cultures. Organizers had a secret plan to observe how students can find common language and solve the task together. Not all teams succeeded, but our team overcame all problems and got the organizers’ praise.

Later this month (May 2004), younger students from our faculty will participate in the Hydro-Web program again and I will consult with them on the main issues. It was a very useful and interesting experience in associating with foreign students and meeting new friends. News about this event will be published at a later date.

- Ann Bozhko, Annual Meeting representative of the Saint Petersburg Student Community for Sustainable Development