Fostering Effective Multidisciplinary Student Teams Through Engineering Projects in Community Service

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Over the past ten years, it has become widely recognized that engineering students need skills that go beyond their technical strengths: skills in communication, project planning, and teamwork, as well as an awareness of the customer in an engineering design project, of ethical and professional issues, and of the social and global context in which their engineering is employed. A key component of this broader education is experience in collaborating with people from many disciplines. At the same time that engineering students are faced with the need to learn "soft skills," students from essentially all other disciplines are faced with a need to understand and appreciate technology. A powerful vehicle for enhancing the technical fluency of non-technical students is participation on design-oriented project teams with students from technical disciplines. The PI is leading a faculty team from education, organizational psychology, organizational communication, and engineering to address the issue of fostering effective multidisciplinary student teams. The EPICS (Engineering Projects in Community Service) program provides the framework for the proposed work. EPICS students earn academic credit for long-term, multidisciplinary, team-based projects that solve technology-based problems faced by not-for-profit community service agencies, K-12 schools, museums, and municipal organizations. Founded at Purdue in 1995, EPICS programs are in progress at six universities and planned at two more, with over 500 students participating on over 50 project teams paired with community partners. Although EPICS projects are engineering-centered, effective real-world solutions rarely depend on a single discipline. The quality of the teams' solutions and the breadth of the students' educational experience will therefore be profoundly affected if the institutional and educational challenges to creating well-functioning multidisciplinary teams can be addressed. Outcomes of the project are anticipated in three areas: Student learning outcomes: The project is developing vehicles to enhance students' ability to work effectively on multidisciplinary teams. As a result of their experience, students should be able to: identify and articulate areas of contribution from their discipline; apply their disciplinary knowledge to advance the team's goals; respect the contributions of individuals from other disciplines; describe how different disciplines add to the effectiveness of the team; enjoy the interactions with other disciplines in accomplishing the team's objectives. EPICS / Program outcomes: The increased effectiveness of the student teams enhances the ability of the teams to meet their community partner's needs. Pedagogical Methods outcomes: The project is developing a body of experience that draws on research and practice from several fields, and recasting the findings to apply them to the specific problems faced by teams of undergraduates in an academic setting. By developing structures and processes that transform EPICS into a truly multidisciplinary program, the potential impact extends beyond the student, program, and pedagogical outcomes. EPICS provides a framework for the in-context integration of faculty research and undergraduate education by the faculty from the many disciplines who will advise teams, bringing the full spectrum of research into the classroom. The collaboration of Engineering, Science, Education, and Liberal Arts has the potential to break down institutional barriers, transforming the way we think about the university. The partnership between student teams and the community gives both students and the people with whom they work a new view of the university, with the potential to transform the image of science and engineering.