Land-use practices such as agriculture can impact mosquito vector breeding ecology, resulting in changes in disease transmission. The typical breeding habitats of Africa’s second most important malaria vector Anopheles funestus are large, semipermanent water bodies, which make them potential candidates for targeted larval source management. This is a technical workflow for the integration of drone surveys and mosquito larval sampling, designed for a case study aiming to characterise An. funestus breeding sites near two villages in an agricultural setting in Côte d’Ivoire. Using satellite remote sensing data, we developed an environmentally and spatially representative sampling frame and conducted paired mosquito larvae and drone mapping surveys from June to August 2021. To categorise the drone imagery, we also developed a land cover classification scheme with classes relative to An. funestus breeding ecology. We sampled 189 potential breeding habitats, of which 119 (63%) were positive for the Anopheles genus and nine (4.8%) were positive for An. funestus. We mapped 30.42 km2 of the region of interest including all water bodies which were sampled for larvae. These data can be used to inform targeted vector control efforts, although its generalisability over a large region is limited by the fine-scale nature of this study area. This paper develops protocols for integrating drone surveys and statistically rigorous entomological sampling, which can be adjusted to collect data on vector breeding habitats in other ecological contexts. Further research using data collected in this study can enable the development of deep-learning algorithms for identifying An. funestus breeding habitats across rural agricultural landscapes in Côte d’Ivoire and the analysis of risk factors for these sites.

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Participation by students in multinational engineering design projects is an activity that has been implemented at academic institutions with the objective of exposing the students to globalization. Such collaborations are becoming a very important practice that prepare students to be aware of the various aspects that are faced whenever work is performed in a global environment. There have been several approaches for the implementation of these activities in the curriculum, and the one presented here is an engineering design project conducted with the participation of students from six different countries. As an assessment of the students' experience, three specific open-ended questions were asked at the end of their participation. These questions cover the basic information of like-dislike-recommendation regarding the collaborative experience. Proper interpretation of responses to openended questions is a complex task, and several approaches have been reported. Data analytics technique of topic modelling is utilized in order to get an objective assessment. Based on the valid responses post-event (n = 95) from the participants to the three basic questions, together with the corresponding demographic information, the feedback is evaluated and conclusions are drawn regarding the effect of ethnicity, which is directly related to geographic location. Positive feedback related to the value of the international experience, negative feedback related to logistics, and recommendations related to communication have been identified based on ethnicity grouping. These conclusions validate previous ones drawn based on numerical feedback on motivation, and will be utilized to improve the offering of a similar multinational collaboration engineering design project to students.

Participation by students in multinational engineering design projects is an activity that has been implemented at academic institutions with the objective of exposing the students to globalization. Such collaborations are becoming a very important practice that prepare students to be aware of the various aspects that are faced whenever work is performed in a global environment. There have been several approaches for the implementation of these activities in the curriculum, and the one presented here is an engineering design project conducted with the participation of students from six different countries. As an assessment of the students’ experience, three specific open-ended questions were asked at the end of their participation. These questions cover the basic information of like-dislike-recommendation regarding the collaborative experience. Proper interpretation of responses to open-ended questions is not an easy task, and several approaches have been reported. In this manuscript, the data analytics technique of topic modelling is utilized in order to get a more objective assessment. Based on the responses by participants to the three basic questions, together with the corresponding demographic information, the feedback is evaluated and some conclusions are drawn regarding the effect of factors like geographic location and gender. These conclusions will be utilized to improve the offering of a multinational collaboration by students in an engineering design project.