Answering to the initiative of Renault “YOUR Ideas, YOUR Initiatives, we have been working on solving mobility situation at our School. This is our third year participating in this contest, which allows us to present better and extended initiatives.
Tes Idées
In our third year in a row participating in the Renault contest, we have thought, developed and improved several strategies that we hope will impact on the school community and neighbours.
As team work, we thought about the mobility problems in our school keeping in mind what we had done before. We observed a new situation that is creating jams when the school starts or ends. The school is located on a two-way street which is marked with double yellow line and means that drivers are not allowed to turn left to enter school. However, many drivers turn left blocking the way for the cars leaving the school and the cars entering on the right way. We have called this situation the forbidden crossroad and we have reflected on the access difficulties resulting from the risky behavior of some drivers that enters the school to drop or pick up students. We have thought of some alternatives to avoid this chaotic traffic. Due to this situation affects not only the school community, but also the school neighbors we need to ask for support to the “Universidad Autónoma de Bucaramanga” and the Bucaramanga Municipal Traffic Department.
Tes initiatives
The goal this year was to continue promoting the autonomous, friendly, and sustainable mobility with my Environment project and to make it part of the community culture through school communication medias like the school newspaper “La Caldera”, the radio station “Ondas Caldista”, the youtube channel “Bloque C”, and the school social networks (facebook and Instagram). Guided by techonology teachers, we have developed technological tools and digital games through gamification and programming tools.We have developed the following actions:
- We implemented a pedagogical campaign to show the proper way to enter the school without breaking the traffic law, using leaflets that we gave to students, parents, drivers, neighbors and any pedestrian walking by the school. In the leaflet we show that our solution help drivers to avoid fines and possible accidents.
- We presented a school access proposal for drivers to the school board using a mockup of the school and the surrounding area to show how our proposal enable drivers to enter the school without breaking the traffic laws and affecting the normal flow of cars. We hope after presenting our project, the school board considers to take it to the founders’ board at the University, so it can be included into the improving and investment budget.
- We created a research project bank that looks for solutions to mobility problems in our school, the surrounding areas (mall center) and other places in the city. Our solutions include the implementation of different strategies such using gamification and creating mobility games using scratch, mobile applications and augmented reality. We also implemented pedagogical and interactive campaigns using digital leaflets, websites, workshops and trainings that let us show the progress we have done in terms of a sustainable mobility.
- We invited to Bucaramanga Municipal Traffic Department representatives to join and support us to develop our proposal to improve the traffic and mobility around the school and to mark the school zone in front of it.
To sum up, all these actions have allowed us to make progressive and considerable changes in our “Instituto Caldas”, and we have become the main actors of the mobility education at school by transforming the troubles into a sustainable culture for the community. We started by learning at home what mobility is and how traffic should be, but our final goal is to impact with our actions an extended community to the school, the surrounding neighborhoods and the city.
