Abstract:

Initially, the population of La Entrada in the Province of Santa Elena, manifested the need of having a pier as an element to activate tourism and provide security for fishing activities.
This need gave the opportunity to the students and professors of the oceanographic Engineering program at the Faculty of Maritime Engineering of the ESPOL for developing activities which allowed knowing the coastal dynamics of the beach of this zone, in order to satisfy the expressed need.
For this, at first time several meetings were set among the community directors, professors and students, in order to acknowledge together the community problems and concerns. Then, the problems on which the student will work were selected based on the skills and knowledge of them.
Over the selected problems, students and professors designed an action plan in order to collect information that would be used to get alternatives to solve the problem.
The designed plan was carry out together with the community. The community provided the boats and logistic support for the data collections campaign. Furthermore, the fishers worked together with the students during the data collection.
Next, the students analyzed the data and exposed the results to the community using a simple and friendly language.
As the students and professor were working at The Entrada, the population was telling them other needs such as:
To improve food and beverages service and the physical aspect and structure of a seawall,
The design of a frigorific chamber for fisheries management
Furthermore the community asked for promotional tourism video.
To satisfy these additional needs, other careers and areas of knowledge were incorporated to the program, such as: Geology and Civil Engineering, Tourism, Naval Engineering and Statistics; turning this work into an interdisciplinary experience that would expand the impact of the work in this community.
As a result of this work the population of La Entrada has a base line of the coastal dynamic and dangers of the beach, a socio economic and citizenship report. Furthermore the community has a design for improving the seawall structure. For helping the fishers to handle the fishing the students design a frigorific chamber.
A video to promote the tourism of the town was made and handed in to the community, as well as two videos about community characters were made as graduation work.
Part of the data obtained by the work carried out by the students and professor were compiled in an educational brochure to develop the population's knowledge about their resources and the importance of taking care for them. The results obtained during this experience were hand out to the community in a public meeting
On the educative side, the following results were obtained:
The students were aware of the need for multidisciplinary work to face a real situation.
The students realize that the knowledge given to them in the classroom were useful for solving real problems in order to satisfy community’s needs.
This type of projects carried out with methodologies that allow the student to be involved with the community, encourages their future work include the participation of the community in which they will intervene.
The students recognize that in order for their intervention to be successful they must communicate their technical findings in a simple and intelligible way for all.

Keywords:

Coastal dynamics, students, Community, development, resources.