Today’s adventure brought us to the campus of The Delft University of Technology (TU Delft), one of the leading technical universities in Europe for architecture and engineering. As an aspiring civil engineer, this was an amazing opportunity to interact with fellow students, faculty, and tour the campus. While on campus, we saw the Green Village and participated in the Climate Fresk Workshop.

Our first activity on campus was touring the Green Village. The Green Village is an outdoor living lab that allows students, researchers, and companies to test sustainable innovations and demonstrate their experimental projects in a real-world setting.

One of the many projects we saw, and even walked on, was a bridge constructed entirely without the use of any glue or cement. The bridge was only made of blocks that “clicked” or fit perfectly together, relying solely on tension and compression to keep it standing. The designers of the bridge took inspiration from ancient Roman arch bridges. Because the structure does not rely on any harmful adhesive, it is much more environmentally friendly. As someone who enjoys learning about history, it was intriguing to see a modern innovation use historical engineering principles, all while promoting sustainability.

After touring the Green Village and seeing many interesting sustainability innovations, we headed to the cafeteria to eat lunch! Following lunch, we went to a classroom to participate in the Climate Fresk workshop at the university. This activity was an interactive card game designed to introduce key mechanisms at work in the complex issue of climate change (1). After splitting into groups, we arranged cards into logical cause-and-effect sequence. Each card represented a specific factor, like greenhouse gas emissions, deforestation, rising temperatures, etc., and how it influenced or was influenced by other processes. In the end, we created a detailed web that showed the interconnected nature of climate systems, human actions, and environmental impact.