Serving the community through engineering design projects
Abstract
The Engineering Projects in Community Service (EPICS) program at Purdue University provides a curricular service-learning structure that enables undergraduate engineering students to provide technical expertise to community service agencies. Under the guidance of faculty and industry advisers, project teams work closely over many years with their partner community organizations to define, design, build, test, deploy, and support the systems the agencies need. The results are systems that have a significant, lasting impact on the community organizations and the people they serve.
Issue
Undergraduate students in engineering will need more than just a solid technical background. They'll be expected to interact effectively with people of widely varying social and educational backgrounds and be expected to work with people of many different technical backgrounds. Community service and education agencies face a future in which they must rely to a great extent upon technology for the delivery, coordination, accounting, and improvement of the services they provide. They often possess neither the expertise to use nor the budget to design and acquire a technological solution that is suited to their mission.
Action
The Engineering Projects in Community Service (EPICS) program at Purdue University provides a curricular service-learning structure that enables undergraduate students and community organizations to work together to satisfy each other's needs. Teams of engineering undergraduates are matched with community service agencies that request technical assistance.
Each EPICS project involves a team of eight to 20 undergraduates, a non-profit community partner and a faculty or industry adviser. A pool of graduate teaching assistants provides technical guidance and administrative assistance. Each team is vertically integrated, consisting of freshmen, sophomores, juniors, and seniors.
Each team is constituted for several years, from initial project definition through final deployment. Each student may earn academic credit for several semesters, registering for the course for one or two credits each semester.
Each student in the EPICS program attends a weekly two-hour meeting of his/her team in the EPICS laboratory. During this laboratory time, the team members take care of administrative matters, do project planning and tracking, and work on their projects. All students also attend a common one-hour lecture each week. A majority of the lectures are by guest experts and have covered a wide range of topics related to engineering design, communication, and community service.
Over time, each project has five phases: establishing project partners, assembling a project team, developing a project proposal, system design and development, and system deployment and support.
Establishing project partnerships
The community partners are selected based on four key criteria:
- Significance: projects that provide greatest benefit to the community.
- Level of technology: projects must be challenging but within the capabilities of undergraduates in engineering.
- Expected duration: Projects that will span several semesters offer the greatest opportunity to provide extensive design experience on the academic side and address problems of potentially high impact on the community side.
- Project partner commitment: Individuals in the organizations must work with the students to identify projects, specify the requirements, and provide ongoing critical feedback.
Assembling a project team
Eight to 20 students are chosen for each project team. Depending on the needs of the project, a team may include students from multiple engineering disciplines as well as non-engineering disciplines. During the 2000-2001 academic year, over 20 academic majors were involved in the program. Teams need technically advanced members, typically juniors and seniors, to spearhead technical progress and younger members to carry the projects into future semesters.
Project proposal
During the first semester of a project, the project team meets with the project partner and the team's EPICS adviser to define the project and determine its goals. A key aspect of this phase is identifying projects that are needed by the project partner, require engineering design, and are a reasonable match to the team's capabilities. This process culminates in a written proposal and presentation.
System design and development
Following acceptance of the proposal, the project team produces a prototype of the proposed system or service. The formal portion of this interaction includes written progress reports, periodic design reviews, and presentations.
System deployment and support
The team delivers a system or service to the project partner. The team must train representatives of the partner, collect feedback, and make any reasonable changes requested by the partner.
Context
EPICS was initiated in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Purdue University in Fall 1995, with 40 students participating on over five project teams. In the 2000-2001 academic year, 400 students participated on 20 teams, addressing problems ranging from data management for social services to mitigation of agricultural pollution and from designing learning centers for local museums to developing custom play environments for children with disabilities. By 1997, EPICS programs were underway at the University of Notre Dame and Iowa State University; in 2000-2001, programs were initiated at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the Georgia Institute of Technology, and Case Western Reserve University.
Outcome
EPICS students learn valuable lessons in engineering, including the role of the customer in defining an engineering project, the necessity of teamwork, the difficulty of managing and leading large projects, the need for skills and knowledge from many different disciplines, and the art of solving technical problems. They also learn valuable lessons in citizenship, the significant impact their engineering skills can have on their community, and that assisting others leads to their own growth.
Evidence
On the academic side, indicators of success include measures of student participation and evaluations. Since the start of EPICS, the rate at which students who are able to return to EPICS from one semester to the next has been over 78 percent. Over nine semesters, 84 percent of students have given the course an overall A or B grade.
Posted On
October 22, 2001For More Information
Resources
Everyone wins with service learning program
While relatively few engineering departments employ service learning programs, a growing number of universities around the country — including UC Merced — are now beginning to incorporate them into graduation requirements. UC Merced modeled its program after one of the country's first service learning programs, started in 1995 at Purdue University.
MercedSunStar.com (August 14, 2006)
Related Practices
Related sites
National Service-Learning Clearinghouse
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