EPICS: A Model for Integrating Service-Learning into the Engineering Curriculum

Page  81 Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning Fall 1997, pp. 81-89 EPICS: A Model for Integrating Service-Learning into the Engineering Curriculum Edward J. Coyle, Leah H. Jamieson, and Larry S. Sommers Purdue University EPICS - Engineering Projects in Community Service - was founded in Purdue University's School of Electrical and Computer Engineering in the Fall of 1995. EPICS significantly broadens the education of engineering students via an extended service-learning experience that is integrated into the engineering curriculum. At the same time, it provides local community service organizations with access to technical expertise and assistance that might otherwise be out of their reach. Introduction Undergraduate students in engineering face a future in which they will need more than just a solid technical background. In setting the goals for any system they are asked to design, they will be expected to interact effectively with people of widely varying social and educational backgrounds. They will then be expected to work with people of many different technical backgrounds to achieve these goals. They thus need educational experiences that can help them develop these skills. Community service 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. They thus need the help of people with strong technical backgrounds. The Engineering Projects in Community Service (EPICS) program provides a service-learning structure that enables these two groups to work together and thereby satisfy each others' needs. This structure supports long-term projects in which teams of undergraduates in engineering are matched with community service agencies that request technical assistance. Under the guidance of faculty in engineering, these EPICS project teams work closely over many years with their partner community service agencies to define, design, build, and deploy the systems the agencies need. The results are systems that have a significant, lasting impact on the community service agencies and the people they serve. Through this service, the EPICS students learn many valuable lessons in engineering, including the role of the partner, or "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 many valuable lessons in citizenship, including the role of community service in our society, the significant impact that their engineering skills can have on their community, and that assisting others leads to their own substantial growth as individuals, engineers, and citizens. The Phases and Structure of EPICS Projects Each EPICS project involves a team of eight to twelve undergraduates, one or more community service agencies, and a faculty advisor. Each team is vertically integrated, consisting of a mix of sophomores, juniors and seniors. Each team is constituted for several years - from initial project definition through final deployment - with students participating for several semesters. This structure enables long-term projects. Over time, each project has five phases: Finding Project Partners, Assembling a Project Team, Project Proposal, System Design and Development, and System Deployment and Support. 81

Page  82 Coyle, Jamieson and Sommers Phase 1 - Finding Project Partners Each EPICS project addresses the technologybased problems of one or more service organizations in the local community. Agencies with appropriate problems must therefore be found. When planning for the EPICS Program started in the Fall of 1994, we were able to contact many different service agencies at the same time by making a presentation about the program and its goals at the monthly meeting of the directors of all local United Way agencies. This single presentation led to many discussions with individual agencies and a long list of potential projects. From this list of potential projects, those best suited for the EPICS Program were selected. Projects are selected based on their: Significance. Not all projects can be undertaken, so those that should provide the greatest benefit to the community are selected; Level of Technology. Projects must be challenging to, but within the capabilities of, undergraduates in engineering; Expected Duration. Although projects may have components that can be completed in a semester or less, each project must be longterm, requiring two or more years of effort from a team of at least eight undergraduates. Since the first round of projects that grew out of the United Way presentation, the source of new projects has been varied. Some projects have been initiated by faculty. Others have been suggested by students. As the program has become known in the community, several projects have been proposed by local community service organizations. Each year, new projects are selected by the EPICS faculty, using the criteria above. From five initial projects in Fall 1995, the program has grown to seven projects in Fall 1996 and to twelve in Fall 1997. The seven 1996-97 projects are summarized in Figure 1. FIGURE 1 Summary of 1996-1997 EPICS Projects Project Title: Project Partner: Tasks: Automated Assistance Center Lafayette Crisis Center Design stand-alone kiosks that will provide information about community services to people in need of assistance. Incorporate means of contacting appropriate agencies. Impact: Improved access to community services. Project Title: Habitat For Humanity Project Partner: Tippecanoe County Habitat for Humanity Tasks: Design energy management systems to minimize home operating costs. Develop new construction techniques and investigate new construction materials. Impact: More energy-efficient housing for Habitat families. Project Title: Home Healthcare Services Project Partner: Witham Home Health Service Tasks: Develop software for scheduling and managing in-home visits of nurses. Design wireless-controlled locks, lights, and other home systems for homebound patients. Impact: More efficient use of agency's personnel; new capabilities to help patients. Project Title: Homelessness Prevention Network Project Partners: Ten Agencies of the Tippecanoe County Homelessness Prevention Network. Tasks: Design and implement a centralized database that allows the agencies to coordinate their services, track their clients, and assemble accurate reports without violating clients' confidentiality. Impact: Improved continuity in serving the homeless; more accurate understanding and reporting of the scope of the home lessness problem in Tippecanoe County. Project Title: Speech-Language and Audiology Clinics Project Partner: The M. D. Steer Audiology and Speech-Language Center Tasks: Integrate a speech recognition system with computer graphics and games to encourage language development. Design and build a working model of the vocal system, for clinicians to use in educating laryngectomy patients. Automate calculation of speaking rate from clinical sessions. Impact: New services for the clinic's client; improved feedback to speech clients. Project Title: Project Partner: Tasks: Impact: Wabash Center Children's Services (2 projects) The Wabash Center Children's Services Develop electro-mechanical toys and play environments for children with physical disabilities. Expanded capabilities and control of their environment for children with physical disabilities. 82

Page  83 EPICS: A Model for Integrating Service-Learning into the Engineering Curriculum Once a project has been selected for the EPICS Program, the service agency that will be directly involved is designated the Project Partner. Phase 2 - Assembling a Project Team Once a project and Project Partner have been identified, a student team is organized. This is done by advertising the project in undergraduate classes and on the World Wide Web. Depending on the needs of the Project Partner, the students chosen for each Project Team. may reflect a single engineering discipline or may be multidisciplinary, including students from two or more engineering fields. The team must be vertically integrated: it must be a mix of sophomores, juniors and seniors. Each student is requested to participate in the project for as many semesters as possible. The combination of a vertically integrated team and long-term student participation ensures continuity in projects from semester to semester and year to year. Projects can thus last many years if new students, especially sophomores, are recruited for the project as team members graduate. In the first two years of operation, 124 students have participated in the EPICS Program. Retention has been excellent. Based on registrations for the Fall 1995, Spring 1996, Fall 1996, and Spring 1997 semesters, 74% of the students who were available to return to the program in the following semester (i.e., were not graduating or off campus on a co-op assignment) did so. The seniors are generally expected to be the team leaders and to have primary technical and managerial responsibility. Their responsibilities include system design, solving technical problems, and training, monitoring, and directing the sophomores and juniors in the tasks of system construction, testing, and deployment. The responsibilities of juniors include assisting the seniors in the planning and organization of the project, solving technical problems, meeting with the Project Partner, and helping supervise the sophomores. They also have principal responsibility for finding sources of information or technical expertise needed for the project. The sophomores become familiar with the project by maintaining the project home page, assisting in the preparation of reports and presentations, and performing tasks assigned to them by the juniors and seniors. Sophomores in the EPICS Program register for one credit per semester; juniors and seniors register for one or two credits per semester. For students in Electrical and Computer Engineering, registration for EPICS in their senior year fulfills the senior design requirement, and EPICS participation counts toward the laboratory requirement. For other engineering disciplines, EPICS registration can be used to fulfill a technical elective requirement. Teams have included students from Electrical and Computer Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Aeronautical Engineering, Industrial Engineering, Interdisciplinary Engineering, Computer Science, and Management. Each student in the EPICS Program attends the weekly two-hour meeting of his/her team in the EPICS laboratory and the common one-hour lecture given each week for all EPICS students. A majority of the lectures are by guest experts, and have covered a wide range of topics. The Executive Director of United Way of Tippecanoe County has met with the EPICS students. Lectures on communications and reporting have included topics such as proposal writing, technical presentations, collaborative report writing, creating World Wide Web documents, and visual design. Faculty members from the Krannert School of Management at Purdue have given presentations on project management, team dynamics, and a series of six lectures (two per semester) on ethics. The students have participated in a "diversity workshop" run by Purdue's Office of Diversity and Multicultural Affairs. A series of lectures on entrepreneurship has brought in speakers from local start-up companies and the founder of a national engineering company, as well as speakers from the Krannert School of Management, Purdue's Office of Industry Relations and Office of Technology Transfer, the Director of the local Business and Industrial Development Center, and the attorney for the City of Lafayette. Purdue Engineering faculty and staff have made presentations on the design process and product safety, as well as on technical topics relevant to several of the teams. Phase 3 - The Project Proposal During the first semester of a project, the Project Team meets several times with its Project Partner and the EPICS faculty to define the project and determine its goals. During this phase the Project Team learns about the mission, needs, and priorities of the Project Partner. A key aspect of this phase is identifying projects that satisfy three criteria: they are needed by the Project Partner, they require engineering design, and they are a reasonable match to the team's capabilities. Also, to ensure that the students build confidence and the Project Partners see progress, the teams are encouraged to pursue a mix of long-term and short-term projects. Short-term projects generally require only one or two semesters to complete; long-term projects take two or more years. This process of project definition culminates in a written proposal and 83

Page  84 Coyle, Jamieson and Sommers presentation in the fourth week of the semester. The proposal is critiqued during a lab session, with detailed feedback provided in the areas of organization, content, technical approach, and writing. The proposal must be approved by the EPICS faculty and then be accepted by the Project Partner. Phase 4 - System Design and Development Starting from week five of the first semester of a project, the Project Team's goal is to produce a prototype of the hardware/software systems discussed in the proposal. Interaction with the Project Partner continues in order to ensure that the systems being designed and developed are as desired. The formal portion of this interaction takes the form of a written progress report and an oral presentation delivered by the Project Team to the EPICS faculty and the Project Partner at the middle and end of each semester. The progress reports must meet the same standards as the proposals. The Project Team demonstrates the current state of their systems to a team of EPICS faculty every five weeks for the duration of the project. This phase of a project lasts as many semesters as necessary for the team to complete the project to the satisfaction of the Project Partner. Phase 5 - System Deployment and Support The ultimate goal of each Project Team is to deliver a system to the Project Partner. After fielding a prototype, the team must train representatives of the partner in the use of the system, collect feedback, and make any reasonable changes requested by the partner. One of the hallmarks of the EPICS Program is that the systems designed and built by the students are deployed in the field, where they provide real, needed service to the community. Goals and Preliminary Evaluation Goals of the EPICS Program include providing students with multi-year, team-based design and development experience; teaching students, by direct experience, how to interact with each other and with customers to define, design, build, and deploy systems that solve real problems; and showing engineering students how their expertise can benefit their community. The EPICS Program emphasizes a number of skills that students will need to become successful, both as engineers and as members of their community: Teamwork. EPICS projects are large, so teamwork is essential. Students learn to divide up a large problem, assign and schedule sub-tasks, and integrate the pieces into a working solution. For some students, EPICS provides significant leadership experience. Communication. EPICS projects require written reports, oral proposal and progress presentations, oral communications with the project partner and consultants, and intra-team communications. Experience with design as a start-to-finish process. The student teams are responsible for all phases of their project, from project definition through planning, risk assessment, design, prototyping, testing, deployment, evaluation, and maintenance. Organizational skills. Because the scope and size of an EPICS project is much larger than is possible in traditional courses, students must learn effective approaches to organizing large, long-term projects. Resourcefulness. Vertically integrated projects encourage students to pursue non-traditional educational resources. EPICS students have observed that it is a new experience to work on a problem for which the "senior down the hall" doesn't have the solution set. Awareness of the customer in an engineering project. The projects increase the students' awareness of the importance of the customer in producing a high quality, useful, and usable product. Community awareness. In interacting with a community that is broader and more diverse than their engineering classes, the students gain awareness of the many needs in their community and their ability to contribute positively toward those needs. Professional ethics. Professional conduct, both in relation to the project partner and within the team itself, is essential, so students must maintain an awareness of ethical principles while meeting the demands of the project. Independent formative and summative evaluation of the EPICS Program has been conducted each semester by Professor J. William Asher, of Purdue's Educational Studies Department. In assessing the students' attitudes towards the program, the formative evaluations have been especially useful. A majority of the students cite the opportunity to obtain "practical, real-world experience in engineering design" as their primary reason for participating in the EPICS Program. In every semester, however, a significant number of the students also identify the opportunity to do communi 84

Page  85 EPICS: A Model for Integrating Service-Learning into the Engineering Curriculum ty service as a major factor in their EPICS participation. Many of the students report that they have done community service in the past, in activities such as tutoring, church work, scouting, soup kitchens, crisis hotlines, and volunteer work for Habitat for Humanity. To date, none of the students has reported prior experience that combines community service with engineering. To complement the descriptive evaluations, we have collected evaluation data along the dimensions of the specific program goals. To date we have responses from 153 student evaluations, collected at the end of the Spring 1996, Fall 1996, and Spring 1997 semesters. The students were asked to "Evaluate the impact that EPICS has had for you on each of the following: Your Technical Skills; Your Understanding of the Design Process; Your Communication Skills; Your Ability to Work on a Team; Your Resourcefulness; Your Organizational Skills; Your Awareness of the Community; Your Awareness of the "Customer" in an Engineering Project; Your Awareness of Ethical Issues." Each aspect was evaluated on a letter-grade scale, with "A=excellent, B=good/above average; C=average; D=marginal/below average; F=poor" with the option for "N/A" for "not applicable". In compiling the data, each "A" grade was assigned 4 points, each "B" 3 points, each "C" 2 points, and each "D" 1 point. Grades of "F" were assigned 0 points. "N/A" responses (a total of 19 out of the 1316 individual grades assigned by the students) were not included in the summary statistics. Table 1 shows the distribution, average, and standard deviation computed over three semesters. Since the emphasis in the early stages of a project is on problem definition and brainstorming of possible solutions rather than on implementation, it is not surprising that the impact on technical skills is rated lower than the other dimensions. In all aspects except Technical Skills, the students' average rating exceeded 3.0, which corresponds to a "B." Ability to Work in a Team and Understanding of the Design Process received the highest scores. Community Awareness received an average rating of 3.2. Introducing Service-Learning into a Technical Curriculum At its inception the EPICS Program was, first and foremost, an engineering education program designed to make up for perceived shortcomings in the undergraduate curriculum in engineering. Students were clearly getting a quality technical education, but the "softer" skills such as communication, working as a team and customer interaction were lacking (Dahir, 1993; Engineering Deans' Council, 1994; NSF Engineering Coalitions Programs, 1997). In this respect, Purdue is joining many other universities in incorporating teambased design into the curriculum. In contrast to many design courses, however, the EPICS curriculum is distinguished by student participation over several semesters or years on the same long-term project, so each student experiences varying roles over the course of the project. This emphasis on long-term projects is combined with a goal of undertaking projects that would ultimately be deployed by the customer. This led to the choice of local not-for-profit organizations (and one community-based clinic at the University) as the customers. They would likely have technological needs without the financial resources to satisfy them. Moreover, the community service agencies will ultimately deploy the teams' systems - an important final step that few commercial partners would take. As the development of the course continued and the first semester began, it became clear that partnering with community service agencies created the opportunity to consider EPICS in the context of a service-learning experience. At Purdue, there are a few successful but isolated service-learning pro TABLE 1 Distribution of Scores and Summary of Evaluation Statistics A(4) B(3) C(2) D(1) F(0) avg stdev Technical skills 25 80 34 6 4 2.78 0.87 Understanding of the design process 58 44 6 0 1 3.45 0.68 Communication skills 71 66 14 1 0 3.36 0.67 Ability to work in a team 95 46 9 2 0 3.54 0.67 Resourcefulness 63 72 17 0 0 3.30 0.66 Organizational skills 47 81 21 3 0 3.13 0.71 Community awareness 63 56 28 3 0 3.19 0.81 Awareness of customer 81 53 14 1 1 3.41 0.74 Awareness of ethical issues 41 62 37 1 0 3.01 0.76 Note. Student evaluation in response to the following: Evaluate the impact that EPICS has had for you on. Evaluation is on a 4-point scale with a rating of A corresponding to a 4.0. 85

Page  86 Coyle, Jamieson and Sommers grams including, most notably, a program at the School of Pharmacy and others at the Ackerman Center for Citizenship Education in the School of Education. Further, there are scattered occurrences of individual faculty members integrating servicelearning components in the courses they teach. However, prior to the EPICS Program, there were no links at Purdue between service-learning activities and the engineering curriculum. Moreover, we found few models for comprehensive integration of service-learning into the curriculum in engineering disciplines. In some senior design courses, e.g., at the U.S. Air Force Academy, the University of Utah, Colorado State University, and the Polytechnic University of Puerto Rico, student projects are drawn from the community. Mechanical Engineering undergraduates at the University of South Alabama design hands-on educational material for local middle schools. In the University of Colorado at Boulder's Integrated Teaching and Learning program, where engineering students participate in a wide variety of design projects throughout their four years of study, some of the student teams design aids for the handicapped. Under the Worcester Polytechnic Institute's Projects Program, students study the influence of technology on society. The Campus Compact network encourages service-learning in the science, engineering, architecture, mathematics, and computer science disciplines by awarding subgrants in these areas. However, compared to many other disciplines, service-learning activities in engineering are few. Once the educational duality between engineering and service-learning in the EPICS Program became obvious, steps were taken to formalize the service-learning side of the equation to ensure that the quality of that experience would be as valuable and long-lasting as possible. As the EPICS Program matures and expands, the faculty and staff are striving to keep the service-learning experience as high-quality and cutting-edge as the technical educational experience each student is receiving. To this end, the program is continually measured and evaluated against the standards set by the Principles of Good Practice for Combining Service and Learning (Honnett & Poulsen, 1989). Following is a look at how the EPICS Program currently measures up to these ten principles and some adjustments that are planned for the future. #1. Engaging people in responsible and challenging actions for the common good. The EPICS Program touches the lives of many people in the community each semester by providing technical assistance to many different community organizations. #2. Providing structured opportunities for people to reflect critically on their service experience. Clearly an underdeveloped area within the program, reflection currently consists of student evaluations at the beginning and end of each semester. As a proactive means of finding a remedy for this deficiency, the staff has sought out the cooperation of a key faculty member from Purdue's Sociology Department. This faculty member will work with a team of Sociology students to develop tools of effective reflection specifically for use by EPICS students. #3. Articulating clear service and learning goals for everyone involved, and #4. Allowing for those with needs to define those needs. The goals of the EPICS Program are carefully explained to Project Partner administrators at the outset and are reiterated to students at the beginning of each semester. Further, the Project Partner administrators and students play an active role in the establishment of team goals - goals that are subject to constant reevaluation as the needs of the partner organizations (and, of course, their clients) evolve and as the team makeup changes each semester. #5. Clarifying the responsibilities of each person and organization involved. This is the charge for every team in the early weeks of each semester. Each team has a number of positions (e.g., team leader, webmaster, Project Partner liaison) that must be filled by consensus. These assignments are based on existing recommendations as to the expected contributions of juniors, seniors, etc., but are frequently driven by the unique personality of the set of students that comprise any given team. Further, participating agencies are informed from the outset that clear direction, ongoing dialogue and feedback, and a reasonable availability to the students is expected of them. #6. Matching service providers and service needs through a process that recognizes changing circumstances. See #3 and #4, above. The longterm, team-based nature of an EPICS project makes it quite different from a typical community service experience. Therefore, the burden of matching needs and providers is on the faculty and organization administrators in the early stages of a project. As a project matures, however, the teamorganization relationship becomes paramount and needs/goals may evolve. In addition, before entering the program, students are presented with a list 86

Page  87 EPICS: A Model for Integrating Service-Learning into the Engineering Curriculum outlining each EPICS project, its goals and the technologies involved; from this list, each student decides with which organization s/he would like to work. #7. Expecting genuine, active and sustained organizational commitment. The support of the EPICS Program by the University, the government, and the private sector has been very gratifying and has including substantial commitments of space, equipment, personnel, and resources. #8. Including training, supervision, monitoring, support, recognition, and evaluation to meet service and learning goals. Training, supervision, and monitoring have all been previously discussed. Regarding recognition, a student award for the EPICS Program has been funded by Advanced Micro Devices (AMD). While this award is design/technology-based, the EPICS Program was undoubtedly made more attractive for sponsorship by this company because of its impact in the community. This award, given every semester, also helps to maintain a high profile for the program throughout the University. And, regarding evaluation, a member of Purdue's Educational Studies faculty is conducting an ongoing formative-summative study of the EPICS Program. #9. Insuring that the time commitment for service and learning is flexible, appropriate and in the best interests of all involved. Since the EPICS courses are less structured than typical engineering courses, EPICS students receive explicit guidance and feedback from the faculty advisors on managing their time. The EPICS Program is one of the very few instances in Purdue's School of Electrical and Computer Engineering in which undergraduate students are given around-the-clock access to a lab. Individual and team site visits are arranged periodically throughout the semester, some at the Project Partner site, and some with administrators of the participating agencies coming to the labs on campus to see demonstrations of works in progress. #10. Commitment to program participation by and with diverse populations. One of the very rewarding aspects of the EPICS Program is the opportunity for male and female students of widely varying ethnic backgrounds and nationalities to not just sit next to each other in a lecture hall, but actively and positively interact toward a common goal. The students' exposure to a variety of lifestyles is further heightened by their interactions with the Project Partner agencies and their clients. Resources and Support The EPICS Program was initiated in the Fall of 1995 with funding from the Innovative Projects in Community Service Program of the U.S. Dept. of Education's Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE Grant No. P116F50129). This grant, plus matches from Purdue University, Comdisco, and IBM, provided funds for two 1/2-time teaching assistants, travel, and equipment needed by the teams' projects. These funds, plus departmental release time for the faculty involved with the program, enabled the program to get under way. During its first two years, it has become apparent that the needs of the EPICS Program fall into four main areas: laboratory space and equipment; hardware and software for prototype development; hardware and software to be deployed off-campus; and personnel. These needs, and the mechanisms and/or plans that have been formulated to meet them, are described below. Laboratory Space and Equipment All engineering design courses that emphasize the construction of prototypes require wellequipped laboratory space if they are to be successful. This requirement is even more critical in the EPICS Program because the hardware and software needs are driven by the projects themselves and are thus difficult to anticipate by more than a few months. The 600 sq. ft. EPICS Software Development Laboratory is used by the teams for: development and testing of software for their projects, preparation of reports and presentations, viewing of tapes of EPICS guests lecturers from previous semesters, review of tapes of EPICS students' mid- and endof-semester reports, and project-related meetings. This equipment was provided by or purchased with funds from the Dean of the Schools of Engineering and the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Microsoft has provided all software requested by the EPICS teams at no cost, and the EPICS Program is covered by the site licenses of the Schools of Engineering. The 600 sq. ft. Hardware Prototyping Lab was established in the Fall of 1996 with a grant (DUE96-50771) from the Instrumentation and Laboratory Improvement (ILI) Program of the National Science Foundation's Division of Undergraduate Education. This grant and the required one-for-one match from Purdue University have provided funds to equip this laboratory. Corporate support for this laboratory has been significant, including digital signal process 87

Page  88 Coyle, Jamieson and Sommers ing hardware from Texas Instruments and a programmable gate array development system from Xilinx. This laboratory enables the EPICS teams to build essentially any electronic or electro-mechanical device they design. Hardware and Software for Prototype Development The EPICS projects provide students with the opportunity to define, design, build, and deploy systems. Since the students are designing unique systems, their hardware and software needs are often not known at the outset of the project. Once a specified need has been identified, a fast response is critical if the projects are to make reasonable progress each semester. The program must therefore always have available a reasonable amount of unrestricted funds for the rapid purchase of material. These funds have been provided by the Dean of the Schools of Engineering and the heads of the participating departments. Hardware and Software Deployed Off-Campus A key feature of the EPICS Program is that the hardware and software that the students develop is to be deployed off-campus in the community. When the project is still in the prototyping stage, these items may be deployed off-campus for testing but then return to the laboratory. Such field testing creates no difficulties. Permanent deployment offcampus, however, requires special arrangements. Since the beneficiaries of the permanent off-campus deployment are the community service agencies or their clients, special permission must be obtained for this deployment, if only to satisfy insurance and liability concerns of the university. The solution to this problem takes two forms. The first is to ask the community service agency to buy the hardware and/or software platforms needed to replicate a prototype for permanent deployment. The second is to lease equipment to agency once its design, construction, and testing are complete. Long-term, we propose to establish an EPICS Foundation to provide the funding for the off-campus portion of the EPICS Program. The foundation would raise funds both locally and nationally for the program. Personnel One faculty member serves as the advisor for each EPICS team. This supervision, when carried out over one calendar year, is considered equivalent to a one-semester, three-credit lecture course. Thus, participation in the EPICS Program is counted in the teaching load of the department. There are currently twelve faculty associated with the program, eight in electrical and computer engineering, two in mechanical engineering, one on sociology, and one in educational studies. Two of these faculty also serve as co-directors of the program. To support the daily operation of the program and to aid in its dissemination throughout engineering at Purdue and to other universities, Purdue's Vice President for Academic Affairs and the Dean of the Schools of Engineering have funded a full-time staff position for an EPICS Program Coordinator. A teaching assistant is associated with each laboratory. Their primary tasks are to organize and maintain the laboratory; serve as consultants to help the students with their designs; and serve as a general knowledge resource for those teams whose projects fall within their areas of expertise. Conclusion The Engineering Projects in Community Service Program has added a new dimension to the educational experience for engineering undergraduates at Purdue University. It represents the first program at Purdue that formally integrates service-learning into the engineering curriculum. Key features of the program include vertically integrated, multidisciplinary teams and multi-year participation. From the academic side, this structure provides students with the opportunity to be involved in all phases of the design process, from project definition through deployment, on projects that are large in scale. Moreover, the structure encourages an extended service-learning experience, with emphasis on providing a model of how engineers can use their technical skills to benefit the community. On the community side, the EPICS structure fosters a longterm relationship between project teams and the community service agency partners, and enables ambitious projects that can have a significant impact. Note Further information about the Engineering Projects in Community Service Program is available at: http://www.ecn.purdue.edu/epics References Dahir, M. (1993). Educating engineers for the real world, in Technology Review, Aug./Sept., pp. 14-16. Engineering Deans Council and ASEE (1994). Engineering education for a changing world, Report of the Engineering Deans Council and Corporate Roundtable of the American Society for Engineering Education. Available from the American Association of Engineering Education. 88

Page  89 EPICS: A Model for Integrating Service-Learning into the Engineering Curriculum Honnett, E. P. & Poulsen, S. J. (1989). Principles of good practice for combining service and learning: A Wingspread special report. Racine, WI: The Johnson Foundation, Inc. NSF Coalitions Programs [Online]. Available: wwwl.needs.org/coalitions/index.html [1997, July 2]. Authors EDWARD J. COYLE is Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Purdue University, where he is co-founder and Co-Director of the EPICS Program. He is a co-recipient of the American Society for Engineering Education 1997 Chester F. Carlson Award for Innovation in Engineering Education. His research interests are in the areas of computer networks, digital signal processing, and stochastic processes. LEAH H. JAMIESON is Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Purdue University, where she is co-founder and Co-Director of the EPICS Program. She is a co-recipient of the American Society for Engineering Education 1997 Chester F. Carlson Award for Innovation in Engineering Education for her work on the EPICS Program. Her research interests are in the areas of speech recognition and parallel algorithms. She is a Fellow of the IEEE. LARRY S. SOMMERS is the EPICS Program Coordinator at Purdue University. He has extensive experience in the management of not-for-profit organizations, having most recently served as Managing Director for the Civic Theatre of Greater Lafayette (IN), Inc. 89