Service-Learning Projects in Core Undergraduate Engineering Courses

The College of Engineering at the University of Massachusetts Lowell (UML) has integrated service-learning (S-L) into many of its core required undergraduate courses over the last three years. Projects that meet real community needs and that help students achieve academic objectives in these core courses are percieved to be difficult to create, but, in this paper, projects for 35 different undergraduate required courses are summarized to help faculty, staff, and students develop S-L projects for their own courses. Faculty at UML were encouraged to “start small rather than not at all.” Courses and projects include, for example, a first-year introduction to engineering course in which 340 students, divided into teams, designed and built moving displays illustrating various technologies for 60,000 middle school students that every year visit a history center that is part of a national park. Another example is a sophomore kinematics course in which student teams visited local playgrounds to assess their safety using deceleration, force, and impact equations learned from the course. Junior heat transfer courses focused in analyzing heat loss and making suggestions for heating system savings for a local food pantry, a city hall building, and a community mental health center, as well as for the university itself; these analyses were developed and presented to the stakeholders. Sophomore student teams from the materials course presented findings to the staff of a local textile history museum to help it begin updating its displays on recent developments in materials. Junior fluids, junior circuits, senior microprocessor, senior design of machine elements, and senior capstone design are having students design and build various parts of an automated canal lock opener for a local national park. Many of the projects are low-cost and can be implemented by individual faculty members without the requirement of a formal institutional program. These S-L projects are integrated into a wide variety of core courses (and not just design courses) and represent typically from 10 to 20 percent of the grade.