Abstract Mototaxism in Colombia is considered an informal employment, in which a motorcycle is used to provide public service; it is a door-to-door service, without established routes, at a perennial frequency and low fares. This modality of employment began in the city of Ocaña about a decade ago, now it has popularized due to population growth, regional migration crisis and high unemployment rates. The “Universidad Francisco de Paula Santander” and the “Universidad Manuela Beltran” in Ocaña, Colombia; from their missional framework, aim to incentivize research training, raising the need to build training projects for students of second and third semester of environmental engineering, integrating statistics as a tool for decision making and data analyses, bringing the academy closer to contextual problems that the students can understand as their own. Environmental engineering students were able to participate with presentation of their results in different events, incentivizing their interest towards research and the use of statistics and mathematics as an important tool for data management and interpretation.