Citizen, Teaching, Industry, Cities for Future Mobility

Co-creation activity: “Developing tools and Apps to improve urban mobility”

Participants: 48 students from the "Mendendez y Pelayo" high school of Barcelona.

Responsibles: Adrian Catalin, Mónica Aguilar, Elisa Sayrol

Data: 19th December 2022, 9:00-13:00

Location: Via Augusta, 140, 08006 Barcelona.

The project 4I4U is oriented to make young citizens between 15-23 years old more sensitive about the carbon footprint issued on their daily routes, and raise awareness of more sustainable urban mobility modes. In addition, it is the objective of the project to increase the awareness of young citizens about urban mobility problems learned through real projects, and encourage them to see how they can contribute to improving urban mobility to make cities more livable.

This activity involves forty-eight 15-16 years old students of a High School. The activity will be repeated in two groups of 24 students each, who are in the 4th year of ESO (Secondary Education). The students downloaded our Apps MobilitApp and MAPPO two weeks before our meeting, so that they already are familiar with them. Agenda of activities in the classroom for each group:

• 
  Interactive presentation (15 min). The goal is to make them aware of the pollution issue in the urban mobility. Also, we will talk about micro-mobility, sustainable mobility and public transport compared to the effects of using private car/moto.


• 
  Urban Mobility Form (5 min). At the end of the presentation we will ask them to fill in our Form about Urban Mobility issues. After, we will debate about what they have learnt from the information given in the form.


• 
  Summary of the MobilitApp tool (10 min). We will briefly present our tool MobilitApp developed to help city entities in charge of public transport to easily analyze the mobility flows of citizens. MobilitApp predicts the means of transport being used with high accuracy. The application is in development and we will explain the current work we are doing, to open a discussion of ideas with the students.


• 
  Co-creation activity using the MobilitApp tool (40 min). The goal is that the students organized in 4 groups, propose an algorithm to perform correctly the process of reading sensor data in MobilitApp. We will show them a piece of the MobilitApp code and propose them to solve a challenging problem about the sensors sampling frequency. They have to design a flowchart of the pre-code to solve the problem.


• 
  Summary of the MAPPO tool (20 min). The tool MAPPO shows 3 alternative routes over the map of Barcelona (OpenStreetMap) to follow a same itinerary on foot: the shortest route, the less polluted route and an intermediate route. We will show them the Dataset of Pullution available in the Barcelona Open Data BCN, which updates the pollution values every 5 min, taken from 8 stations deployed throughout the city. The application is in development and we will explain the current work we are doing, to open a discussion of ideas with the students.

First, we presented the 4I4U project of the EIT Urban Mobility to the students, highlighting the fact that one of the main goals of our project is to empower young citizens like them to become actors of change for a better urban mobility in the near future and to participate in the transformation of Barcelona.

and we next talked about the worrying health problems derived form the pollution generated by the high number of gasoline-powered cars that we currently have in cities like Barcelona.

By means of an interactive presentation, we talked about statistics in Europe of premature deaths due to pollution. Also, we talked about PM10, PM2.5 and PM1 particulate matters.

The aim of this activity was to cover all these aspects: (i) share with them information about the main issues regarding urban mobility; (ii) introduce our two APPs (MAPPO and MobilitApp) that we have developed during the project to help to improve urban mobility problems;

(iii) co-create together a piece of the code of MobilitApp; and (iv) discuss brainstorming ideas and suggestions for our next steps in developing MAPPO. We really had a wonderful time with both groups of 4th secondary education in the Menéndez Pelayo High School of Barcelona.

Twitter: https://twitter.com/MonicaAguilarIg/status/1605280973251399711