Expectations

Let us start with a few expectations of the students. There were some general ideas about cooperation:

"I expect to have a lot of fun with you guys learning new things like your culture, hobbies, opinions, and many many more." Mateusz, PL

"We don't really expect something specific, but we would like to learn about people from other countries and share information about our personalities." Eirini, Georgios, Dorina (GR)

"I like to talk in English and to talk to other people. It sounds interesting to do projects and to improve my English skills." Milena (D)

Some were about the topic we were about to tackle:

"I expect to find out more about society and smart cities, what we can do better in future to reduce emissions and improve air quality." Tim (D)

"This project will help us to have a clean city and a healthy atmosphere and live more happily in our cities." Annie and Justina (GR)

"I’m very interested in learning new perspectives and opinions about creating, building and maintaining smart cities and changing existing cities to smart cities in the future." Pawel (PL)

Steps

1. What is a smart city?

Olek and Krzysiek (PL) found this definition: According to Nicos Komninos (Professor of Urban Development and Innovation Policy at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki) a smart city is an area consisting of four main elements: creative populateion, efficient institutions and procedures, developed broadband infrastructure and documented ability to innovate, manage and solve problems.  

Here are some of the students' ideas:

"Furthermore smart cities are trying to solve urban problems by using technology for example to invest in the infrastructure by going ahead with a digital leading system." Kristijan (D)
 

"In my view, a smart city is a city that has clever solutions (not always related to high technology) for problems, it would be even better if the solutions were ecological." Zuzanna (PL)

"A smart city is the city of our imagination. When we think of a smart city, we imagine a virtual reality with flying cars and robots, but on the contrary these technological advances will also be useful in our daily lives. For example green cars and buses, smart 'rubbish bins' and bicycle lanes on the roads." Mariam, Christina (GR)

2. Is our city smart?

Students chose these topics to research: school, 5G, power stations, rubbish, congestion, infrastructure, safety, climate change and ecology.

They evalutated their own places and tried to find out as much as possible without being able to go out and investigate as under "normal" conditions.

We will need to go back to that question now that we have created our own elements of a smart city.

Conditions@school

Smart houses

Smart schools

Smart city amenities

Smart payments

Smart public transport

Smart assistants

Project & Schools

Topic