War brings need for SDG-related skills into sharper focus

It came as no surprise that security considerations precluded Dr Mykola Trehub, vice-rector for educational innovations at the Kyiv School of Economics (KSE), from sending me any reading material about the university’s unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV or drone) programme and that there are no slick promotional videos of students launching drones in the field.

Nor was I surprised when Trehub politely declined to tell me where the laboratories for this masters programme are located.

What was surprising, however, was to hear that – even while under the pressure of Ukraine’s now three-year-old existential war against Russian aggression – woven through the curriculum designed to teach students how to design and manage the production of UAVs are the United Nations Sustainability Goals (SDGs).

Trehub responded with a steely tone when I asked if any of the 71 students in the programme had questioned the emphasis on SDGs in the middle of war.

“First of all, they are future professionals. They are at the masters level. The masters level demands specific qualifications be developed for their career. They are not at the bachelor level when they have to produce projects only about manufacturing without understanding the wider issues.

“At the masters level, they should understand how something, a part, fits into the life cycle of materials and how it fits into the life cycle of energy needed to produce it, which is SDG 12: Responsible consumption and production,” said Trehub. The life cycle of materials includes how the metals and plastics that make up the body of the drone will be responsibly disposed of.

This approach to developing aerial systems is the antithesis of the history of aeronautical development. In the Second World War, for example, rather than repair fighter planes on its aircraft carriers, the Americans threw damaged fighters over the side and into the Pacific Ocean.

Theoretical and practical knowledge

Opened in 1996 and modelled on Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Olin College (Franklin, Massachusetts), a small engineering-focused college, KSE follows the mens et manus (mind and hand) concept of education that gives equal weight to theoretical and practical knowledge.

The exigencies of war have led KSE, the first private university in Ukraine, to expand from focusing mainly on business courses to developing programmes in microelectronics and nanoelectronics, urban science (in which students are training to help rebuild Ukraine’s destroyed and badly damaged cities), social psychology and memory, conflict studies, and a course (which this author teaches via Zoom) titled Issues in Public Memorialisation of War: Who gets to tell history.

The three-semester UAV programme, begun last fall, unites engineering and entrepreneurship, said Timofii Brik, KSE’s rector.

“Entrepreneurship is crucial because engineers will have to build drones and then scale up. Today it’s war, but tomorrow there will be more applications for drones, like delivering medicine or fertilisers. And it will be high tech, and Ukraine must have entrepreneurs to compete globally in the market of innovation.”

Trehub describes the programme as a mixture of hard sciences – for example, physics and aeronautics – and what he called “soft skills”, which include written communication skills necessary for writing student theses and business and materials reports. Additionally, communication skills include those needed to effectively work in study, production, and business teams.

Sixty per cent of the programme is taught in Ukrainian, including the basic math-heavy courses. Forty percent is taught in English, including the business courses and those that deal with cutting-edge materials and information and other technologies.

Both professors and students must undergo a background security check. Most of the students in the UAV programme have bachelor degrees in electrical, mechanical, or general engineering, or they are IT specialists.

Course outline

Although understandably guarded about the pedagogical practices in the programme, Trehub was able to tell me that students use 3-D modelling in the development of their drones. The next step will be integrating virtual reality into the classroom.

Virtual reality can be used several ways, beginning with understanding the manufacturing process of this or that part and in the final construction of a drone, he explained.

Secondly, virtual reality, some of which will likely be based on video games and some of which is developed from videos of drones being used in the real world, will allow students to practice “piloting” both existing drones and those the students themselves design.

Trehub was also unable to name the UAV programme partners, though he was able to say that they are working with universities and companies in Western Europe, the United States, and Canada that are developing drones.

“We also have ongoing contracts with software producers so we can understand how to provide overall designing projects and use available software,” he said.

Students are taught how to use artificial intelligence both in the design process and in writing the software needed to operate drones.

However, Trehub explains, AI presents a special security challenge. Students are not allowed to use it for some tasks involving design because doing so would risk revealing Ukraine’s military secrets. “But to develop software or to add to programming, there we definitely use AI,” he told University World News.

The programme’s capstone assignment sees students divided into groups that design drones. They have to explain to a target audience what the drone will be used for. One student will oversee the research and development process while another will be responsible for the calculations. Another student focuses on the manufacturing process. Finally, the students make a pitch for money for a start-up company.

SDG 15

While acknowledging that drones are drones and that the general parameters of civilian and military drones are alike, Trehub says his students are not designing military UAVs.

Rather, they are designing drones that accord with SDG 15: Life on land, as they are primarily designed to be used in demining operations in the large swaths of Ukraine’s fertile ‘Black Earth’ region (and elsewhere) that the Russians have sown with mines and other anti-personnel devices.

According to a UN report published last September, some 25% of Ukraine’s land mass, an area four times the size of Switzerland, is mined; since the Russians have been on the ground in the western and southwestern quadrants of the country, the percent of land that has been mined is effectively far higher than 25%.

Last August, the UN reported that tests showed that the success rate for demining drones was “as high as 78% for detecting items on the surface, around 70% for detecting metal and buried items, and 62% for detecting plastic items.”

Military drones fitted with ordnance have a different weight than do drones designed to, for example, seed or survey agricultural land (Ukraine is a major producer of wheat and canola seed) or search for the tell-tale magnetic signature of mines and anti-personnel devices.

Other differences are the life cycle of batteries and radio signals. Yet UAV technology, Trehub explains, is “holistic”, with the difference between military and civilian drones being, essentially, a matter of degree.

Accordingly, I ask whether his colleagues or students experience ethical conflict over working in a university programme that develops skills that can be used for to military development.

“I asked a lot of teachers and students at the university about this specific question,” Trehub said. “They told me that we’re in Ukraine and everybody knows we use drones. Everybody knows why they are used,” he added.

“And, everybody knows that when the war stops, we’ll use them in our lives in non-military actions. They will be for civilian use, but the technical processes will be the same,” he noted.

Environmental awareness

This discussion led to Trehub explaining how the war has sharpened the nation’s environmental consciousness and, thus, prepared the students in the UAV programme for serious consideration of the SDGs in their design work.

The Russian aerial offensive against Ukraine’s electrical infrastructure prompted people to acquire and use large batteries.

“That was a good thing at the time,” Trehub said. “But now we are faced with the problem of recycling those batteries. People are now working on understanding the life cycle of batteries that we didn’t think about before.”

The blackouts caused by Russia’s attack on the electrical infrastructure, he added, have “caused people to feel differently about the consumption of electricity and its production. We now think a lot about how to provide green energy”.

Another spur to focusing on the SDGs is an environmental effect. Ukraine’s territory has been subjected to millions of explosions. Even as these explosions destroy buildings and vital infrastructure, a great deal of the energy of these explosions blows out into the surrounding air, Trehub explained.

“Our students have to understand this and the environmental impacts on natural resources. We definitely feel, for example, that the last two winters that were above average in temperature could be influenced by these explosions,” he noted.

Aeronautical heritage

Russia’s colonial attitude toward Ukraine – save for a few years after the First World War, Russia ruled most of Ukraine for centuries until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 – has resulted in the absorption into Russia’s historical narrative of what would otherwise be seen as Ukrainian aeronautical achievements.

Igor Sikorsky, the inventor of the first usable helicopter, was born in Kyiv and was educated in that city’s polytechnic which now bears his name. And the aircraft designer Oleg Antonov did his most important work in Kyiv.

“Ukraine’s engineering industry has a long history, often overshadowed by Russia. Sikorsky is the most famous example, followed by Antonov and the Mriya, the largest plane in the world.

“Today, we are pushing the frontiers of engineering, designing drones. However, their production, organisation, teamwork, and business models for scaling are vastly different from traditional aerospace engineering.

“KSE is uniquely positioned in Ukraine because we are not burdened by legacy constraints and are driven to be entrepreneurs out of necessity. Our benchmarks are Olin College for innovative, project-based learning and MIT for research,” said Brik.