Engineering For The Developing World Course Gives Students International Experience

A new course, Engineering for the Developing World (EDW), has been taught since fall 2005. The course goals include: (i) introduce students to open ended problems at the community level; (ii) help students develop the skills to solve those problems and provide holistic engineering solutions that are sustainable and appropriate to the community being served; (iii) help students develop cultural and social awareness; (iv) help students work in interdisciplinary teams; (v) give students the opportunity to reflect on the importance of their community service; (vi) give students a professional work ethic, and (vii) help students gain a better understanding of the importance of engineering in society and in community development. Two different models for the course have been used: in year one, a single team of three students worked on two different projects for a community in Rwanda over two semesters, earning six credits that could be applied as technical electives in their respective majors. In year two, twelve students in three teams worked on a wastewater treatment/reuse design for a community in Sonora, Mexico. In this format, students earned 3 to 4 credits for the course, which counted as the capstone design experience in their curricula. The students self-selected this international project from among three project options (the other two were service learning projects within the state) in the capstone Environmental Engineering design class. Student evaluations of the EDW course are presented and contrasted against feedback from students who worked on other service learning projects or a traditional civil engineering project. Motivation for Capstone Design Experiences Design experience is an important part of the engineering curriculum. The ABET 2005-2006 accreditation criteria for engineering programs 1 indicate this importance via criterion c: “Engineering programs must demonstrate that graduates have (c) an ability to design a system, component, or process to meet desired needs within realistic constraints such as economic, environmental, social, political, ethical, health and safety, manufacturability, and sustainability.” The list of specific constraints noted by ABET has grown over time. Capstone design courses also have the ability to teach a variety of the other ABET-specified skills and abilities, many of which are difficult to incorporate into traditional engineering courses. Examples include multidisciplinary teamwork (criterion d), an ability to engage in life-long learning (criterion i), and others 2 . Professional engineering societies have added other criteria to the so-called “body of knowledge” related to their field, many of which are optimally taught in a capstone design course context. For example, the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) Body Of Knowledge (BOK) outcomes were expanded to include an understanding of project management, business and public policy, and leadership principles and attitudes 3 . These elements are readily incorporated into a capstone design experience where the student team is a simulated consulting firm working on a real project for a real client. P ge 12637.2 The National Academy of Engineering (NAE) “Engineer of 2020” report 4 notes the importance of developing “more ecologically sustainable practices as we seek to achieve economic prosperity. Sustainable practices must proceed apace in industrialized countries and developing countries alike.” Further, the report recognizes that technologies used in industrialized countries may not be appropriate world-wide, stating: “The engineer of 2020 will have to understand how to adapt solutions, in an ethical way, to the constraints of developing countries.” 4 The report also emphasizes the complexity engineers face will continue to increase and requires consideration of cultural, societal, political, and economic constraints and impacts. Many times this type of complexity is lost and designs focus on largely technological constraints. Senior design courses are the epitome of project/problem-based learning (PBL), which have been shown to be a more effective pedagogy for learning than traditional lecture/exam based methods. 5 Most capstone projects follow a “just-in-time” learning model, allowing students to be quite self-sufficient in locating and teaching themselves the information they need, with a variety of professors and professional mentors to provide assistance as needed. The courses compared in this study all incorporated significant “just-in-time” learning, with varying levels of outside direction supplementing this base. Unique Goals for Engineering for Developing World (EDW) Course The new course development has been supported by a grant from the National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance (NCIIA) and the Engineering Excellence Fund at the University of Colorado at Boulder. The course was specifically geared to meet the ABET criterion of student understanding of the impact of engineering in a global and societal context (criterion h), as well as the NCIIA goals of addressing such issues as poverty, disease, and environmental degradation through affordable design, technologies that solve critical problems and meet basic human needs (such as food, water, shelter, health, safety, and education), and pedagogical approaches that encourage awareness of and interest in these global issues. The idea is somewhat similar to Ruwanpura 6 in having an international design project in capstone Civil Engineering courses. The course objectives are to: • Introduce students to open ended problems at the community level, • Help students develop the skills to solve those problems and provide holistic engineering solutions that are sustainable and appropriate to the community being served, • Help students develop cultural and social awareness, • Help students work in interdisciplinary teams, • Give students the opportunity to reflect on the importance of their community service • Give students a professional work ethic, and • Help students gain a better understanding of the importance of engineering in society and in developing community development. While some of these objectives (such as interdisciplinary teamwork) are common to most capstone design courses, many of these objectives are unique. P ge 12637.3 Full Year EDW Course In year one (2005-2006), a single team of three students (one majoring in Civil, one in Mechanical, and one in Aerospace engineering) worked on two different projects for the Muramba and Mugonero communities in Rwanda over two semesters, earning six credits that could be applied as technical electives in their respective majors. The project was part of an ongoing project of the Engineers Without Borders – USA chapter at the University of Colorado at Boulder (EWB-CU). All three students in the EDW course had been previously involved with EWB-CU and two had traveled to Rwanda before enrolling in the course. The two projects included rainwater collection and treatment and solar powered lighting. The course itself was fairly structured with required meetings, readings, discussions with experts from the development field, etc. These meetings occurred weekly during the first semester. The second semester was significantly more self-directed by the students. These three students spent 20 days with the partner communities in January 2006 along with three other students from the EWB-CU student team, and the same six students visited the two communities again in June. Produced deliverables included: • an interview plan to learn about the broader needs of the communities • design of an expanded rainwater catchment system • design of solar powered lighting systems for a school, a medical clinic, and a hospital Various reports written as part of the project included: • A Project Management Summary -December 2005 • A January 2006 Implementation Trip report • A Project Management Summary -May 2006 • A draft technical design document and user’s guide of the “Bring Your Own Water” (BYOW) hybrid water purification system • A Solar Lighting System User’s Guide • A final report in June 2006 In the fall semester, each student also gave two technical presentations. The Rwanda group had an interpreter/assistant, but the majority of the people that the EWB-CU group worked with spoke a reasonable amount of English. The user guide documentation that the students created was translated into French (by a paid translator), rather than the native language of Kinyarwandan. Despite initial plans per the course syllabus, the students did not write a reflective paper on their service learning experience. However, some indication of the benefits of the course was evident in the student comments in the course survey administered in fall 2006: “The most important thing I learned, that was unique in this EDW course, was how to actually implement a small scale engineering solution in the field. There is really no other way to learn about the nuts and bolts of implementing a solution in a real community without actually doing it. I learned valuable lessons about engineering/construction logistics in a foreign country as well as communicating on engineering and construction concepts with a team of local P ge 12637.4 technicians. Another extremely valuable aspect of this course was the fact that we took the project from the beginning, through design, prototyping, and testing, all the way to implementation. This was by far the most rewarding and thought provoking class in my undergraduate career.” “That course was an excellent capstone to the work we had done in Rwanda over the past few years, and was the most successful year we had with the project. The course partially substituted for my Aerospace Engineering senior design courses and was one of the most valuable courses I had. This is primarily due to the small class size and the collaborative and discussion based nature of the course.” “The importance of non-engineering knowled