Learning by Doing: Reflections of the EPICS Program

In this paper we describe the EPICS Program at Purdue that was started in 1995 and has evolved into a multidisciplinary academic program engaging more than 800 students per year from nearly 70 disciplines across and outside of engineering. EPICS has been disseminated to other campuses and has been adopted as a K12 approach for introducing engineering through community engagement. This paper describes the current program and shares best practices and lessons learned as the program developed to provide insight for faculty and administrators seeking to develop service-learning, learning through service-learning, or community-based engineering. Data from the program related to student learning and community impact is shared. A discussion of the characteristics to make dissemination successful is also discussed.