Wetskills Mexico 2019

Finals at AquaTech – and the winners are…

Wetskills Mexico 2019 - by Simone van Holst & Andrea Velasco Martinez This morning everyone woke up with excitement and maybe a little bit of nervousness because it was the day of the finals! In the morning all pitch presenters had time to practice and optimize the pitch to shine brightly on the Stage at AquaTech Mexico 2019. At 13.30 all groups were meeting at the entrance of AquaTech and everyone was dressed to impress. At 13.30 some groups practiced the pitch a last few times while the others walk around AquaTech to network with other water professionals. At 17.00 the moment we had all been waiting for started the pitch finals! By lottery the order of presentation was picked. The first group who had to give their presentation was DropWise. Arturo gave a clear pitch presentation about the technical and educational part of their water in schools project. Second up was...

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Trip to Teotihuacan – an authentic Mexican experience

Wetskills Mexico 2019 - by Beatriz Adriana Rojas González (Universidad Panamericana) - Early this morning, at the Universidad Panamericana there was a bus waiting for us, which would take us to a new adventure. The trip to Teotihuacan was peaceful, when we arrived, we can immediately saw the Ciudadela with these huge constructions that teotihuacanos did. After we met Daniel, our guide, we embarked on our trip to the pyramids of the Sun and the Moon. Teotihuacan means house of the gods, teotihuacanos were polytheists, which means they have a lot of gods, each one used to have an altar where they offered a sacrifice. The main gods in Teotihuacan were Quetzalcoatl, god of the Sun, which mean feathered serpent and Tlaloc, god of the rain, which means nectar of the ground. The more we walked, the more we knew about this civilization, their way of life, how can they construct enormous pyramids, how...

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Poster and Pitch Training

Wetskills Mexcio 2019 - by Ilse Meeuwsen (Radboud University) & Cesar Chávez Flores (Instituto Tecnologico de Arandas) - After a really nice and fun night most of us had problems to wake up this morning. Today poster and pitch training was on the program, but first two groups had a skype call with their case owners. The poster training and the pitch training is very important, as we only have a small amount of time to finish our cases. So the time we have, we need to fill in efficiently. We saw some examples from posters of previous Wetskills and had to mention what was good and what could be improved. After the training we had a good idea how to design a poster and how it should look like. We also noticed while talking, that all groups are struggling with their cases. This was actually a good way to do a small...

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Feedback, Piñata and Party

Wetskills Mexico 2019 - by Regina Méndez Guerrero (Universidad Panamericana) and Alejandra López Vázquez del Mercado (Universidad Panamericana) - Today we had a different workflow than the whole week; at the morning each team met with Tim and Ken to have some feedback and be ready for the final steps of Wetskills and keep working during the day. After all the teams hard work by the morning, we went to Arturo’s house where he had a delicious barbecue. It was a really a group effort with some people that went to buy everything, while others started with preparing for the party. Two of our Mexican friends (Arturo and Leo) were the masters of the barbecue and they did a pretty good job feeding all the food lovers of the team. For desert two Dutch friends (Quirine and Ilse) baked an exquisite apple crumble that is a traditional dessert from The Netherlands. The...

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Ideas are coming together

Wetskills Mexico 2019 - by Leonardo Bueno Guerrero (Universidad de Guadalajara) & Brenda Palomares (UNAM) - Things have started to come together, today we got a peak of how far other team’s work is coming along. It was the first time that we talked about the cases of everyone and we still had a big question mark above our heads. It’s amazing to see how all the creativity and ideas and different backgrounds can be depicted in the awesome ideas that are shaping. We’ve come a long way. Here at Wetskills the journey is about working with water issues in different approaches, geographic situations and getting you out of your comfort zone to see a problem you might have seen a thousand times. It is also about teamwork; we are learning by living and practicing teamwork every day, getting to know about different cultures, and broadening our points of view in a...

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Brain Hurricane in the University Panamericana

Wetskills Mexico 2019 - by Lisa Kappetijn (psychology and international politics) and Sofía Casco (innovation and design eng.) -   Today we spend the whole day at the University of Panamericana. Beautiful place with great facilities, we are honored to be hosted and appreciate the generosity. The day started relaxed with people coming in for the Wetskills introduction presentation. This gave an even better insight to all the things we are going to learn.   After that, we did the brain hurricane which was intense, but super informative. Each group of the four groups discussed their case in a 10 minute speed session with an expert. It was very interesting which gave us the feeling of getting 20 solutions, 20 problems and 5 Worldviews.   In the afternoon we all went to different directions to bring all the information together and worked on first drafts the Action Plan. Our group had the pleasure of the presence...

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Welcome to Wetskills Mexico 2019

Wetskills Mexico 2019 - by Arturo Zavala Guzmán (UNAM) and Quirine van der Meer (WDOD) -   Today was our first day of Wetskills Mexico. After an informal meeting with some of the participants yesterday today was all about getting to know each other and learn about the cases.   We started this day at the Universidad Panamericana where we got on a bus. The bus took us to the site where we would meet one of the case owners: Instituto Mexicano de Tecnología del Agua, IMTA. The bus drive to IMTA of 2 hours gave us the opportunity to meet all the participants and learn more about the cases.   At IMTA we met the director who told us more about what IMTA does and what the challenges are for an organisation like IMTA. What inspired me the most for this Wetskills challenge was his comment saying that the technology and knowledge are there (so...

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