Engineering Your Community: Experiences of Students in a Service-Learning Engineering Design Course

One of the significant issues facing engineering over the past several decades has been the recruitment and retention of students, particularly minority and female students. One method that has proven fruitful in attracting these groups is to utilize a service-learning approach to show the applicability of course content and the ways that it can positively affect others. Many programs, such as Engineers Without Borders, target service opportunities for engineers in a developing country and typically attract a higher percentage of female and minority participants than the national averages for engineering. Opportunities such as these are wonderful, but there are vast opportunities available within one’s own community as well. At a large urban university in the mid-west, a course is being piloted with a group of honors students based on the Engineering Projects in Community Service (EPICS) framework to allow vertically integrated and multidisciplinary student teams to work on projects to aid the residents and staff of a local inpatient facility catering to individuals with debilitating neurological diseases. The class was open to any student in the university’s honors program, and drew students from engineering, art and design, and the sciences.

Two of the student teams will be highlighted in this paper. The first team consisted of a senior mechanical engineering student and a senior biomedical engineering student, who proposed designing a device to track lower arm mobility and strength for residents with various neurological disorders. The device is intended to allow for tracking of muscle degradation overtime. Focus is placed on the lower arm movements because of their application for daily living and specifically wheelchair operation. The motions mimicked by the device include squeezing and all six degrees of freedom related to wrist mobility.The second team, consisting of biomedical engineers, an electrical engineer, and a computerscientist, worked on a project to enhance the sensory stimulation of the residents. Because of the neurological disorders the residents are coping with, they experience a multitude of functional, visual, and communicative impairments. In order to compensate for these impairments, the goal of the project was to design an interactive game table that will enable and encourage interpersonal interaction among fellow residents, interactions with the outside world through tactile and visual feedback, and intellectual stimulation by way of strategy.

In this paper, a description of the curricular structure and the student projects will be presented. In addition, the students will present their experiences with the course and how their participation has affected their view of engineering and their future careers. A subset of the students in the course will discuss their own unique experiences with the course, specifically focusing on working in a multidisciplinary and vertically-integrated team, the development of teamwork and technical skills, and the impact of the course on their view of engineering. After the discussion of each student’s individual experience, the common experiences of the students will be discussed with implications for similar courses/programs.