National Dissemination of the National Engineering Projects in Community Service (EPICS) Program

人们普遍认识到，工科学生需要的技能超出了他们的技术优势：沟通技能、项目规划、客户意识、伦理和专业问题以及工程实践所处的社会和全球背景。加上从头到尾的设计经验，这些技能标志着对体验式教育的日益重视。将这些方面整合到工程课程中对教育质量至关重要。然而，人们也广泛认识到，传统的工程专业并不是完全拥有这些技能的毕业生。越来越多的人意识到，扩大工程师核心能力的概念，将这些技能包括在内，可能对于实现性别和种族多元化的工程专业人员群体至关重要。社区服务工程项目(EPICS)是普渡大学发起的一个屡获殊荣的学术项目，旨在满足教授工程设计和满足社区获得工程和技术专业知识的双重需求。基于众多成功的衡量标准，EPICS正在有效地将高度指导的、长期的、大规模的、基于团队的、多学科的设计项目整合到本科工程课程中，并成为解决工程设计教育关键需求的典范项目。该项目与微软研究院合作，在全国范围内推广EPICS模式。传播计划由五个部分组成：可共享的软件基础设施、教师发展研讨会、种子赠款、制度化伙伴关系和内容传播。建议在五年内向1000多名教职员工传播。

It has become widely recognized that engineering students need skills that go beyond their technical strengths: skills in communication, project planning, awareness of the customer, of ethical and professional issues, and of the social and global context in which engineering is practiced. Together with start-to-finish design experience, these skills mark an increased emphasis on experiential education. Integration of these dimensions into engineering courses is critical to the quality of education. However, it has also been widely recognized that traditional engineering programs are not graduating students who fully possess these skills. There is also a growing sense that broadening the notion of an engineer's core competencies to include these skills may be critical to achieving a population of engineering professionals that is gender- and ethnically diverse. Engineering Projects in Community Service (EPICS) is an award-winning academic program that was initiated at Purdue to address the dual needs of teaching engineering design and meeting community needs for access to expertise in engineering and technology. Based on numerous measures of success, EPICS is effectively integrating highly mentored, long-term, large-scale, team-based, multidisciplinary design projects into the undergraduate engineering curriculum as well as being an exemplary program that is addressing a critical need in engineering design education. In partnership with Microsoft Research, this project is implementing a national dissemination of the EPICS model. The dissemination plan consists of five components: sharable software infrastructure, faculty development workshops, seed grants, partnerships for institutionalization, and content dissemination. Dissemination to over 1000 faculty over a period of five years is proposed.