A Mobile Educational Lab Kit for Fragile Contexts

In this paper, we discuss an innovative approach to learning engineering and building a pathway to entrepreneurial innovations through a versatile educational lab kit, the EngStarter. The EngStarter emerged as a result of three years of experience in offering university-level engineering to refugee learners. This engineering kit is an open-source hardware educational kit designed to provide students with the necessary tools, instruments, and pedagogies to build real-world solutions to their problems while learning fundamental concepts of electronic circuits, programming, and the internet of things. EngStarter is designed to amplify educational practitioners' ability to facilitate curricula that are socially driven by demonstrating different ways that technology can help students to solve local problems and thereby foster self-reliance and sustainability.