Engineering Projects in Community Service (EPICS) is a program in which teams of students earn academic credit for long-term projects that solve engineering problems for local community service organizations. The EPICS program is distinguished from many traditional engineering design courses in several important ways: 1. It is a large team experience (typically 10-12 students per team). 2. It is cross-disciplinary: a single team may include students from up to three engineering disciplines as well as, in the case of two current teams, Sociology students. 3. It is multilevel: teams are a mix sophomores, juniors and seniors, with plans to include freshmen starting in the Spring 199~ semester. 4. It is a long-term design experience: a student participates for several semesters, so problems of significant scope can be tackled. 5. It pairs each team with a local community agency as a real customer. 6. It involves students in a true define-design-build-test-deploy-support experience. EPICS projects involve diverse technologies including digital electronics, electromechanical systems, computer aided design and manufacturing, manufacturing processes, composites, rapid prototyping technologies, energy management systems, human-computer interfaces, computer networks, and wireless communication. This proposal requests $55,000 from NSF (with $55,000 in matching funds from Purdue) to help develop a modern manufacturing facility for the EPICS program. The goal is to enable student teams to fully implement and test their designs. The proposed computer numerical controlled (CNC) lathe and CNC mill would allow students to learn modern computer controlled manufacturing techniques and provide hands-on experience with state-of-the-art manufacturing equipment. The addition of a modern manufacturing capability is essential to the continued development of EPICS as a multidisciplinary program. It will further enable the program to become a national model of how community and customer awareness an d skills in communication teamwork, leadership, project management, and system design can be taught to engineering undergraduates.
