This effort will create a new organization, Engineering for American Communities (EFAC) at the University of Colorado at Boulder to involve students in community-based projects for service learning. The role of EFAC, which in concept is a derivative of Engineers Without Borders, is to provide innovative and reasonably-priced design services for local, low-income customers aimed at creating significant impact on lives while being extremely affordable ? costing less than a single day?s pay. The products either result directly in an improved quality of life or provide customers with tools and solutions that might allow them to earn more money and attain a higher standard of living. This project represents an opportunity to conduct groundbreaking engineering education research to fully understand the impacts of altruistic engineering on student learning and attitudes, including commitment to engineering as a career. It integrates design for affordability throughout the K-16 engineering curriculum. Its ramifications will be assessed with a multitude of metrics, layered repeatedly throughout design activities. The investigation will develop an understanding of how participation in these activities changes student attitudes towards engineering, what students learn from participation, and whether the social context provided by these design activities may differentially recruit and retain students who have not traditionally been attracted to engineering.
The EFAC program provides powerful academic experiences for students in the University of Colorado at Boulder?s College of Engineering and Applied Science and its partner K-12 institutions, while building community with people in urban Denver and rural Colorado. This project seeks to discover how altruistic engineering affects a diverse audience of students and how to better prepare engineering students to meet the needs of a changing society. This model is replicable at almost any American university, where either an urban or a rural customer focus is within easy reach of its engineering students. It generates an opportunity to help U.S. citizens living below the poverty line, provides an innovative and unique learning situation for engineering students, and lays the framework for large-scale engineering education research with a cross-disciplinary set of set of researchers, teachers and learners.
