Engineering Service Learning at Children’s Museum: A Decade of Empowering the STEM Education Pipeline

One of the most effective techniques to teach engineering in higher education is service learning, in which student learning objectives are combined with community service to provide a real-life, progressive learning experience. A significant part of engineering introductory courses are team projects, which are effectively facilitated through service learning. This paper describes a 10year service-learning project at San Antonio College (SAC) done in close collaboration with The DoSeum, formerly the San Antonio Children’s Museum [1]. It presents the development, implementation, and results of this project, which is included as a component of a freshman-level Introduction to Engineering course. Initially, the museum’s Education Coordinator requested our help to develop thematic toys and games to teach visiting children various physics concepts. This evolved to align with the re-development of The DoSeum into a STEM center during the past decade. The project starts with the museum education team, the “customer,” presenting to engineering students the physics concepts they need addressed as well as the aesthetic, technical, and safety requirements of the project. Each student engineering team chooses a physics concept to design and build a toy or game “exhibit” that meets all requirements, using recycled and repurposed materials as much as possible. The teams present their prototypes to the engineering course instructor and The DoSeum team for inspection, feedback, and approval. After final modifications, a product test with the “customers” (children and their families) is conducted at The DoSeum. On a busy Saturday afternoon, hundreds of children and their families play with the exhibited toys and games and indicate their preferences on a ballot to decide the “Top-3” exhibits. At the same time, The DoSeum’s education team has the option to select projects that are suitable to be donated and become exhibits in the museum. The project concludes with detailed team written reports that describe how the multi-step engineering design process was used to design, build, and test a new product. The final activity is a class discussion where students exchange observations and lessons learned. Feedback on this project has been almost universally positive since its inception. This paper also provides conclusions and suggestions to help other schools start a service-learning component in their “Introduction to Engineering” course that will not only benefit students, but also help their communities learn more about engineering.