Introduction to Engineering Through Service-Learning

Service-learning (S-L) is the integration of academic subject matter with service to the community in credit-bearing courses. In an engineering context, service-learning provides a project-based experience in which students are presented with real clients and their problems, often of immediate need. This paper reflects on three years of service-learning integrated into a first engineering course with approximately three hundred students per year. The costs and benefits of service-learning to students, faculty, and clients are analyzed through several means including traditional teaching evaluations, blind pre- and post-assessments by students and clients, multi-year institutional data regarding student performance, and others. The results indicate that a majority of students personally believe that the described service-learning project is a valuable experience and should be integrated throughout the engineering curriculum. However, the service-learning experience varied significantly across teams, students, and course offerings.