Introducing A Service Learning Component To A Freshman Engineering Graphics Course

ENGR 1120 serves as an introductory course in engineering graphics for freshmen in Biological and Agricultural Engineering at The University of Georgia. The prevailing emphasis in the course has traditionally been to develop 2-D and 3-D graphics communication skills, heavily weighted in the enhancement of visual skills and the ability to generate sets of working drawings through an intense final group project. For the past three years, the approach to this final project has been for the instructor to give a fairly well defined description of a problem and leave the development of an early-stage solution to the creativity of the students. This approach has yielded positive results with respect to preparing them for their sophomore and senior level engineering design courses. However, in order to incorporate the ethical and societal responsibility of the engineering profession, while maintaining the traditional emphasis necessary in graphics science, a service-learning element has been included in the final project beginning Fall 2001 wherein the students define their own problem using instructor criteria that gears the student toward identifying a community need for disadvantaged individuals. This paper reports on the framework for this effort and the results for Fall 2001 and Spring 2002.