Capstone Design in Engineering Community Engagement Course

One subset of experiential learning is the pedagogy of community-engaged learning, which has also been called service-learning, as well as learning through service. Community-engaged learning is an umbrella term encompassing a broad range of engagement experiences with the goal of enhancing academic learning outcomes (Bielefeldt et al. 2013; Pierrakos et al. 2012). In STEM fields, this often takes a form that can be described by the Model of Project-Based Community Engagement (Leidig and Oakes 2021b). Its characteristics include community partnerships (Bielefeldt et al. 2010) and authentic contexts that include real community needs (Coyle et al. 2005). Within the engineering space, community engagement programs have grown substantially during the past thirty years (Munoz and Mitcham 2012; Schneider et al. 2009; Shuman et al. 2005). Over this time, these activities have drawn large numbers of participants and been perceived as powerful recruitment tools for the profession (Amadei and Sandekian 2010; Budny and Gradoville 2011; Moskal et al. 2008; Paterson and Fuchs 2008), particularly for women and underrepresented minorities (Swan et al. 2014).

Community engagement programs have been demonstrated to motivate students to work harder than in traditional classes, and to gain a deeper understanding of the subject matter while gaining insights into the complexity of social issues (Eyler and Giles 1999). A study of more than 22,000 undergraduates also showed a connection with higher college GPAs, as well as increased critical thinking and writing skills (Astin et al. 2000). Within engineering specifically, studies have shown benefits in developing professional and technical skills, including teamwork and communication (Coyle et al. 2005), self-directed life-long learning (Jiusto and DiBiasio 2006), and design skills (Zoltowski et al. 2012). Bielefeldt et al. (2010) have further claimed that project-based learning and project-based community engagement “are both effective pedagogies to achieve a broad array of core knowledge and skills that are critical for engineers” (p. 542).

A number of examples illustrating the application of community engagement in civil engineering education are available in the literature. Many institutions, such as the University of Pittsburgh (Budny et al. 2016; Gradoville and Budny 2011), Mississippi State University (El-adaway et al. 2015), and the United States Military Academy (Wambeke 2020), have conducted such projects, especially within capstone design courses. While the details of their findings vary somewhat, their results generally indicate that community engagement projects are well-suited to support students to meet or exceed ABET outcomes, and note the perceived benefits of real-world project contexts in particular toward bridging the gap between education and industry. Key lessons learned include: Projects depend on strong partnerships that require time to develop and continuous attention to be paid to each stakeholder’s interests (Pando et al. 2014); up-front evaluation of possible projects, their potential impact, location, safety concerns, and resource constraints are critical (Ellzey et al. 2019); and no two service-learning projects are the same, thus requiring adaptation in each case (Mostafavi et al. 2016).

Two exemplars of community-engaged engineering organizations, EWB-USA and the EPICS program, are at the heart of this case study.

The largest community-engaged engineering organization in the US, EWB-USA is a 9,500-volunteer-strong organization founded in 2002 with the mission of “build[ing] a better world through engineering projects that empower communities to meet their basic human needs and equip leaders to solve the world’s most pressing challenges” (EWB-USA 2020). It has pursued these ends largely through implementing international infrastructure engineering projects as part of programs that are developed as full partnerships between a host community, one or more local non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and an EWB-USA chapter. The organization is well-known for the impressive gender diversity of its volunteers, with over 40% of its 5,600 student participants identifying as female, particularly in comparison to the overall gender misbalance in the field. Its members are spread over 165 student and 74 professional chapters in the United States. In 2019, these chapters collectively worked on 452 projects in 29 countries and 26 US states and territories, impacting one million people (EWB-USA 2020).

Previous studies have argued that the EWB-USA experience helps develop skills and attributes valuable for the engineer of 2020 and beyond, including teamwork and leadership (Savage and Knight 2018); effective communication and decision-making (Wittig 2013); and appreciation for other cultures and increased awareness of the role of ethics in engineering (Jaeger and LaRochelle 2009). It is also claimed that “EWB-USA serves as an example for multi-faceted retention of engineers, particularly females” (Litchfield and Javernick-Will 2014, p. 8). A large mixed-methods study of students and professionals both with and without experience in EWB-USA found that “[e]ngineers involved with engineering service may gain strong professional engineering skills that do not compromise their technical skills” (Litchfield et al. 2016). The authors indicate this may be attributable to the “realistic, complex, and contextualized learning experiences within engineering service activities” (p. 70).

Founded at Purdue University in 1995, EPICS is a curricular service-learning design program in which students work on multi-disciplinary vertically-integrated teams, partnering with community not-for-profit organizations (Coyle et al. 2005) to participate in highly mentored, long-term, large-scale design projects. Since its founding, the program at Purdue has grown to engage more than 1,100 students per academic year, working on more than 130 projects with 57 local and global community partners (Oakes et al. 2014, 2018; Zoltowski and Oakes 2014). The EPICS courses and advising structure are supported by common processes and resources across the program, allowing for standardized and efficient implementation that still offers flexibility to individual instructors. In the spring of 2019, 42% of the participants were female, and 43% were non-Caucasian. More than 50 other institutions have likewise incorporated EPICS into their curriculum in some manner (EPICS, n.d.-a). The curriculum structure is constructed to allow students to enroll over multiple semesters, satisfy different graduation requirements including technical electives in each engineering discipline, and provide the opportunity to pursue the work as a capstone project in one of four disciplines currently available: electrical, computer, multidisciplinary, or environmental and ecological engineering (Oakes et al. 2019). Between 30 and 45 students per semester choose this capstone option, which includes oversight from faculty in their home department to ensure all requirements are met. The EPICS program has been mapped to the Model of Project-Based Community Engagement by Leidig and Oakes (2021a), documenting the resources provided and benefits gained by its many stakeholder groups. Huff et al. (2016) found that alumni of the EPICS program believed their participation in the program bridged the gap between coursework and workforce, served as a means of gaining workplace experience, and helped them develop a variety of professional skills.

At Purdue University, the EWB-USA student chapter began a partnership with EPICS in 2014, eventually becoming fully integrated into the curricular system (Oakes et al. 2019). This was made especially practical by Purdue’s block tuition model, which allows students to take EPICS for one or two credits without paying additional tuition. While typical EPICS sections are limited to a maximum of 25 students, the EPICS EWB section has registered over 40 students in recent semesters.

Within the EPICS program and EWB-USA, community partnerships are formed to last for a minimum of five years. Within this period, the length of individual projects can vary, and students engage with the portion of the project that is active in the particular semesters in which they are enrolled, transitioning onto or off of the team as needed. The Purdue EWB-USA chapter, along with the EPICS program, committed to the program covered in this case study in 2018 (Oakes et al. 2019). The program’s project focused on working with the members of a rural community in Bolivia to co-design and construct a potable water supply and distribution system for thirty-two homes from a combination of spring and surface water sources. The program stakeholders include the community members, their community water board, in-country NGO Engineers in Action (EIA), EPICS EWB-USA at Purdue, and EWB-USA. At the beginning of the 2019 fall semester, the chapter had completed two on-site assessment trips and was working on an analysis of design alternatives.

In the EWB-USA Purdue chapter, the three capstone students formed a sub-group within the larger technical design team that focused on developing models of the water flow and distribution in the water supply project introduced previously. Three community home clusters were proposed to be fed by three independent sources, each with its own separate catchment, storage, and piping subsystems. This naturally led to the capstone students to dividing up the work, with each focused primarily on one of these subsystems. In the project description, the students summarized their deliverables as follows.

As indicated, the objectives were refined over time. The original items are those that were laid out in the project proposal, while the updated list reflects the work eventually completed and documented. These shifts were precipitated by the goals and process planning of the overall project adapting to new information becoming available over the time period of the capstone project. As the students explained in their project description: “By providing one route per spring system that already takes into account cultural, technical, and environmental factors, we can reduce the amount of time the travel team spends investigating during the next assessment trip.” And, “Currently, the EWB-Purdue team is looking at contingency plans that utilize pumps or connecting spring subsystems during the dry season. So, our team decided it would be beneficial to create a set of informational and educational materials for the EWB team so that they can understand how to use and update the [hydraulic] models when new information becomes available.” This type of evolution in response to external events reflects the types of situations the capstone students will face and need to effectively respond to as they continue working on design projects during their professional careers.

The documented achievement of all seven ABET Criterion 3 student outcomes and their sub-component indicators is required to complete the capstone experience. This is formally tracked through the outcomes matrix, in which each outcome is listed in a separate row of a table. In this form, students provide short statements indicating the ways they have demonstrated meeting that outcome, followed by links to references where evidence of the work is recorded. Some of the outcomes are comprised of multiple subcomponents called indicators, and they are separated to provide structure to the reporting process and reviews. Students add items to the outcomes matrix over time, beginning in the first semester of their capstone experience. Based on this, they receive feedback, which sets and communicates the expectations for achievement in the course. Iteration on the document continues until the advisors have signed off on each outcome as having attained at least an adequate/acceptable status. The students may continue to update the table beyond this, as they attempt to raise their grade in the course beyond the minimum requirements to pass. From this interactive process, the number and type of items listed in each section varies depending on project demands and individual student participation.

Table 2 shows the distribution of source material types used by the students in their outcomes matrices to provide proof of their competencies. This is intended to give a sense of how the various assessments and student work tied into and supported the different student outcomes. This data reflects the self-reported connections the students made in their final documentation, but it should not be seen as limiting opportunities for further connections in the future. A stronger connection between the project proposal and ABET Criterion 3, Student Outcomes, Outcome 5’s call to establish goals and plan tasks could be more explicitly documented in a future course, for example. It should also be noted that many different types of work are primarily documented in the notebook, from weekly project work items to reports for EWB-USA, scheduling documents, meeting notes, or even record of a hydraulics lesson the capstone students planned and delivered to other EPICS students. Individual artifacts could be used to show achievement in multiple outcomes, where appropriate.

Table 3 presents examples of documentation provided by the students towards their demonstrated attainment of each of the ABET Student Outcomes. See Fig. 1 for the pictures mentioned in the ABET Student Outcome 7 evidence excerpt.