Students build playground, teach STEM to Indigenous children
They traveled through the Costa Rican rain forest, traipsed alongside testy cows, turned out tamales, cannonballed into the base of waterfalls, and played games that involved noodles and marshmallows.
But it wasn’t at all child’s play for Grand Canyon University's Engineers Gone Global.
Earlier this summer, the student-led club, whose mission is to use engineering skills to serve underserved communities around the world, traveled to the Indigenous mountain village of Shiroles, about a six-hour drive from San José, Costa Rica. It was a trip the students planned on their own.
The student engineers wanted to build a playground for the children served by Esperanza, a faith-based community development and ministry.
It was an idea that grew out of the club’s trip the previous summer to the same area, facilitated by Dr. Luke Mayer, a former professor in the College of Engineering and Technology who had a connection to the ministry.
“The funniest part about it is that when we showed up, all that we had supplies-wise were a bunch of rods of steel and a very large plastic slide that was probably 10 feet long,” said senior mechanical engineering major Audrey Davis, the club’s president.
A local team provided everything else, including valuable welding skills.
“We packed what we needed to bring for our personal selves, and we communicated with the team there. We gave them a rough idea of what we wanted to do,” added club Vice President Tyler Keen.
The group of around a dozen GCU students followed up with math calculations. They worked out angles.
After just two days, the children in the community slid down that 10-foot slide, swung on two sets of swings, and dipped and rose on the double seesaws – a bright spot students added next to the nearby soccer field. The playground was completed just in time for the community soccer tournament the following morning.
"It was fulfilling for us to use all we've studied and learned for a greater purpose," Davis said.
The young students playing on the new playground probably didn’t know the challenges the team had, such as the language barrier. The GCU students didn’t know much Spanish or the language of the Indigenous Bribri.
Explaining math and angles? Not easy.
Then there was theory versus reality.
Keen spoke about all the planning the students did, like drawing plans on cardboard and figuring out the trigonometry “napkin-style.” But even with all the planning, things can change on a dime, he said.
“It was really cool to see in action because you can’t plan for every little thing. Like the ground there, ‘Oh, we need to dig a little bit wider in this direction because we were off a little bit.’ … Planning can only get you so far, but are you willing to adapt and change in the middle of a situation?”
One miscalculation involved the stairs for the slide that ended up flying in the air instead of pointing toward the ground.
“We made it at the wrong angle,” said biomedical engineering junior Jaden Feldsien with a laugh. “That was just a funny story,” she said, adding that the mistake illustrated the importance of clarity and thoroughness in engineering, where teamwork and communication are critical.
Building the playground was just the beginning of the team's seven days in Costa Rica.
The GCU students also taught STEM lessons to the young children in the nearby school.
They led a bridge-building project, helping local students construct bridges using marshmallows and noodles that were then placed between tables to test their strength. They also built model boats and paper airplanes, “so you could kind of see the engineering principles mixed in with those,” Davis said.
“It (the bridge-building activity) is an icebreaker game I’ve played before, but it was a cool way to simulate statics for them on a very basic level, which was a class I had taken this past year,” she said of statics. It is the branch of engineering that studies physical systems in stable equilibrium and focuses on forces and torques and how they act on objects at rest or moving at a constant velocity. Statics helps ensure buildings, bridges and machinery do not fail or move unexpectedly.
Outside of those STEM classes, the team also played soccer – a lot of soccer – with the children in the community, practiced worship music in Spanish for a church performance, led devotionals and ran Sunday school activities.
“That was a really cool experience, just being able to sing with them. … and just being able to see the joy on their faces when we were singing in a language they could understand,” Davis said.
They also delivered hot meals prepared for the community and witnessed a baptism at a waterfall after a post church-service hike.
“It was so much. Every day was so full,” said Keen, who learned what it meant to serve selflessly after watching a man named J.P., who had a big heart for the community.
“He’s every single day serving that community in every way possible,” Keen said of Shiroles, which struggles with poverty and drugs. “It really just inspired me to think the same way while I’m here as a student leader on campus and throughout my life, just seeing how I can serve in every way possible and not just on a transactional basis.
“Before I came to GCU, my perspective was get my engineering degree, get an engineering job, set up the rest of my life. But any major at GCU, any person from any walk of life, has something to give to others.”
Feldsien, who is the Engineers Gone Global treasurer, said she really learned how “surface-level things don’t really mean anything in the grand scheme of things.” Being with people, with community, is what's important.
And for Davis, what she remembers the most is seeing the joy in the community, despite the challenges it faces.
“Serving goes a lot more beyond building tangible things for them but also building relationships … and just getting to witness the joy in their lives brings a whole new perspective,” Davis said. “We often think with an American mindset that generosity comes with having a lot. But even when they have a little, they were still extremely generous and welcoming and just joyful to help out.
“We were expecting to go and serve and serve and serve, but we actually ended up being served just as much as they were.”
Manager of Internal Communications Lana Sweeten-Shults can be reached at [email protected].
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