Free Cartography Workshops for the Comprehensive Education of Engineering Students: A Methodological Proposal for Their Development and Systematization

This paper presents a methodology for conducting and systematizing educational activities to accomplish two objectives: (a) disseminate the role of free technologies in society among primary school children through the implementation of free cartography workshops; (b) contribute to the comprehensive formation of Computing Engineering students, specifically in the development of soft skills and social context awareness. The free cartography workshops are performed by university students and are aimed at primary school children. Concepts like local knowledge and collaborative knowledge construction, as well as basic cartography terminology are constructed through playful activities. Cartography related tasks are completed through the use of the free software Open Street Maps and Field Papers. The proposed methodology has been designed based on the results of a previous experience, carried out in 2016 in rural areas of the country, in the context of the celebration of the Science and Technology Month, an event organized by the Ministry of Science, Technology, and Telecommunications (MICITT). The paper also describes the experience provided by using this methodology in two free cartography workshops held in communities with a lower social development index. Finally, the workshops methodology is enriched with a proposal for an experience systematization process aiming at acknowledging learning, evaluating results and identifying possible improvements to the workshops methodology.