An innovative project on integrating university and high school in a multidisciplinary engineering approach

High school teaching was not always able to follow the rapid changes in automation and communication technologies, despite the relevance of the environmental and technological problems in society. Therefore, these topics are not well covered by the high school curricula. One of the possible actions to reduce the gap between school and technological development is to develop real projects in the school applying new technologies. To this end, the University of Buenos Aires, the Argentine Association of Automatic Control and two high schools (one specialised on electricity technology and other in informatics) developed the project presented in this paper. The main educational objective of the project is to integrate researchers, professors and students of different levels to work for the solution of real technological problems, involving different aspects: technical, methodological-organisational, conceptual, and social. The technical objective of the project consists on the automation and Internet connection of a solar energy facility. The solar panel will be oriented and controlled automatically by a control system composed of PLCs and supervision software. The whole control and the data from a meteorological station will he accessible by Internet. This project is being developed from September 2001 until July 2002 by teams integrated with high schools students, teachers, university professors and researchers on each field involved (automation, renewable energies, informatics) and wins the prize to the educational innovation 2001 granted by YPF-ANTORCHAS Foundation Argentina.