Service-Learning: Engineering in Your Community

This exciting new Service-Learning textbook will help you teach integrated engineering design within a socially beneficial context. It can be used as a principal text or as a supplemental resource for addressing the service-learning component of either freshman design courses or upper-level capstone design projects.

Service-Learning is playing an ever-greater role in the education process, combining learning objectives and service objectives with the intent that both the recipient and the provider of the service benefit from the interaction. This is accomplished by combining service tasks with structured opportunities that link the tasks to self-reflection, self-discovery, and the acquisition of values, technical skills, and knowledge. In the process, it also addresses your school's responsibility for public engagement.

Service-Learning: Engineering in Your Community links design methodology and engineering analysis with an understanding of the way engineering principles can be applied to benefit society in tangible, practical ways. Teaming skills, project management, communications, and ethical considerations also play an integral role in the process.

Marybeth Lima teaches biological engineering at Louisiana State University and, as LSU's '02-'03 Service-Learning Fellow, has received funding from Housing and Urban Development for service learning work. William C. Oakes teaches freshman engineering at Purdue and is the co-director of the EPICS program, which has received an NSF grant to expand the program nationwide.