Integrating Engineering Education and Community Service: Themes for the Future of Engineering Education

2005 Bernard M Gordon Prize Lecture*

I. INTRODUCTION

On February 20 2005 the National Academy of Engineering recognized the achievements of the Engineering throw outs in Community Service (EPICS) program with the Bernard M Gordon Prize for Innovation in Engineering and Technology Education. As its establishers and directors, we were recommended "For innovations in the education of tomorrow's engineering leaders through developing and disseminating the Engineering casts in Community Service (EPICS) program."

We are real proud that our program has been honored with this prestigious award. We confidence the attention it focuses upon the program highlights the ways that long-term for-credit throws in the community provide the time and connected thought [i]or[/i] thoughts for experiences that enable our scholars to:

* develop technical profundity and multi-disciplinary breadth;

* experience start-to-finish design;

* acquire and oilstone many professional skills;

* create returnss that have a significant impact upon their community; and

* enlarge as individuals, engineers, and citizens.

These benefits of EPICS were results that the engineering education community was seeking in the early 1990 [1-4]

We believe integrating time and connection into other aspects of the curriculum will lead to further innovations that provide issues that the engineering education community seek fors for the coming decades [5 6]

II. OVERVIEW OF EPICS

A. Motivation

EPICS was created as a issue of discussions in the early 1990 about the state of engineering education [1-4] The engineering education community was drawing fire for graduating pupils who had strong technical backgrounds on the other hand few of the other skills necessityed for successful careers. The consensus was that scholars to be ready for the coming time would need:

* professional skills, including the ability to work in a team environment, communicate effectively, work with customers, and manage projects;

* awareness of the many issues affecting any engineering throw including ethical, legal, and environmental issues; and

* the ability to work with race from many different backgrounds and in many social settings.

The challenge was that these are notoriously difficult to teach or disentangle in a traditional engineering curriculum. A fresh curricular structure was needed that continued to provide technical profundity but also created experiences that would build these additional capabilities.

At the same time, community service organizations were facing a time to come in which they must take advantage of technology to improve, coordinate, account for, and deliver the services they provide. Their challenge was to find the long-term low-cost customized technical assistance that they required.

EPICS was created without of the realization that these mutual emergencys created a unique opportunity to form long-term partnerships between the university and the community [7] The vision was that the partnership would provide sum of two units benefits:

* academic credit for engineering scholars via long-term, large-scale, real-world design throws that benefit the community, and

* access for the community partners to the low-cost technical expertise they extremityed to improve their capability to labor for the community.

This combination of challenging engineering design casts and long-term service to the community has proven to be extremely happy EPICS students are learning one as well as the other the technical and professional skills they ne The productions they develop and deliver to their community partners are being used each day in the community.

B Curricular Structure

EPICS is built around the conception of long-term partnerships between pupil teams and not-for-profit organizations in the community. Each team and its community partner work closely together to identify and interpret the partner's technology-based problems. Table 1 not absents four examples of EPICS teams and throws selected from the 17 gymnasiums that currently have EPICS programs. These illustrate the technical profundity multidisciplinary breadth, and community impact of throw outs The projects fall broadly in four areas: education and outreach, access and abilities, human services, and the environment. The sampling of shoot forwards also demonstrates the range of ways in which this archetype has been disseminated and by what mode it takes on different forms in different environments.

A unique curricular form enables each EPICS team to maintain a long-term relationship with its community partner and to fortunately design and deliver products that have significant technical complexity and significant community impact.

EPICS is implemented as a track of courses, where a team corresponds to a division or lab section of the course. Each team is large-10 to 20 students-and vertically integrated-composed of freshmen sophomores, juniors, and seniors. A learner may be a member of a team for up to four years, registering for individual to two credits each semester When seniors graduate each year, returning pupils move up a year and novel students are added to the team. Many EPICS teams have discloseed formal training processes for novel members. The large team size, vertical integration, and credit construction enable each team to continue with a core of returning learners each semester and year. In issue the teams function as a small engineering design firm, with the community partner as its customer. This enables the teams to tackle and full projects of significant size, complexity and impact in the community. more [i]or[/i] less teams have been in operation for ten years and have delivered a series of throw outs to their community partner.