National Dissemination of the National Engineering Projects in Community Service (EPICS) Program

Purdue University, West Lafayette IN

Investigators

Abstract

It has become widely recognized that engineering students need skills that go beyond their technical strengths: skills in communication, project planning, awareness of the customer, of ethical and professional issues, and of the social and global context in which engineering is practiced. Together with start-to-finish design experience, these skills mark an increased emphasis on experiential education. Integration of these dimensions into engineering courses is critical to the quality of education. However, it has also been widely recognized that traditional engineering programs are not graduating students who fully possess these skills. There is also a growing sense that broadening the notion of an engineer's core competencies to include these skills may be critical to achieving a population of engineering professionals that is gender- and ethnically diverse. Engineering Projects in Community Service (EPICS) is an award-winning academic program that was initiated at Purdue to address the dual needs of teaching engineering design and meeting community needs for access to expertise in engineering and technology. Based on numerous measures of success, EPICS is effectively integrating highly mentored, long-term, large-scale, team-based, multidisciplinary design projects into the undergraduate engineering curriculum as well as being an exemplary program that is addressing a critical need in engineering design education. In partnership with Microsoft Research, this project is implementing a national dissemination of the EPICS model. The dissemination plan consists of five components: sharable software infrastructure, faculty development workshops, seed grants, partnerships for institutionalization, and content dissemination. Dissemination to over 1000 faculty over a period of five years is proposed.