Service Learning

The core principle of Service Learning gives students the unique opportunity to bridge their academic curricula to a public setting and promotes the transfer of knowledge within communities.

Information Literacy and Research introduces engineering students to the evaluation, usage, impact and ethical aspects of information and research. This course enables students the ability to effectively evaluate and use different types of information sources, such as scholarly articles, books, and websites. By doing so, students are able to conduct research using various methods, such as literature reviews, surveys, and interviews which allows them to effectively develop critical thinking skills such as analysis and synthesizing information. This will allow them to draw conclusions and make informed decisions which then they can present to a larger audience.

Service learning is an integral part of the course as it allows students to apply their research skills to real-world problems and work collaboratively with community partners to address social issues. In the course, the semester project is actively working with a diverse population — being the elementary students — and engaging in meaningful dialogue through the utilization of skills such as empathy, active listening, and cultural competence. As our engineering class worked closely in collaboration with education students, we were able to create a bond through mutual understanding and respect of knowledge for our respective fields of study. Dr. Kidd and Dr. Ringleb established a framework of what would be known as the Ed+gineering through both of their courses.

Each team is expected to choose an engineering topic in which they will evaluate, research, and relay that information in a simpler manner to the elementary school students. Our team specifically chose the creation of a windmill to understand the importance of wind power in the present day. The major challenge faced for this semester project was the worldwide outbreak of COVID and trying to establish methods to compensate for the loss of physical lecture time with the elementary students. COVID has been detrimental, not only to our project, but to many individuals' lives whether it affected them mentally, physically, or socially. It was important for our team to persevere to execute our team's goals to perform this service learning objective for this younger generation.

In a collaborative effort, the teams within the class decided to host meetings through Zoom to constantly keep project updates and ultimately give these children an enjoyable and insightful learning experience. In turn, through our solution we were able to create a well-constructed presentation for our topic, and a video lecture explaining our research, design process, and thorough development phase for the elementary students to follow along.

By participating in this Service Learning course, we became more engaged and responsible citizens, gained a deeper understanding of community needs, and made a positive impact on a society. Furthermore, these skills can also be applied to my future career goals and personal life, as the ability to extend the knowledge of one's own academic learning to a wider audience can ultimately improve society as a whole for the foreseeable future.