Epics: Meeting Ec 2000 Through Service Learning

Engineering Projects in Community Service — EPICS — is a service-learning program that was initiated at Purdue University in the Fall of 1995. Under this program, undergraduate students in engineering earn academic credit for long-term team projects that solve technology-based problems for local community service organizations. Approximately 300 students are currently enrolled in EPICS at Purdue and they are organized into 20 project teams. . With its emphasis on start-to-finish design of significant projects that will be deployed by the community customers, EPICS addresses many of the program outcomes mandated for ABET accreditation. This paper describes the procedures and documentation that have been developed to enhance and evaluate the students' abilities to: function on multidisciplinary teams; communicate effectively; and understand the impact of engineering solutions in a global and societal context.