2009 EPICS Conference on Service-Learning in Engineering and Computing

Posted by on March 2, 2009

2009 EPICS Conference on Service-Learning in Engineering and Computing

Austin, Texas
August 3-4, 2009

https://engineering.purdue.edu/EPICSU

The Annual EPICS Conference Overview
The purpose of the Annual EPICS Conference is to bring together the community involved in integrating the
educational needs for realistic design experiences with the technological needs of the local communities
through service-learning. The conference format is designed to facilitate discussion and sharing of common experiences, best practices, assessment strategies, institutionalization successes and lessons learned that can be employed across campuses. The emphasis is on discussion and collaboration. There are no formal papers at the conference but abstracts are published and archived on the EPICS Website. The annual conference is made possible with funding from the National Science Foundation through a National Dissemination Grant and is one way that the EPICS Program disseminates information on its model for community-based design education.

Who Should Attend?
Conference attendees include faculty, staff and corporate partners of current and prospective EPICS programs. However, the conference is designed for a broader audience that includes all educators,
community members and industrial partners who work with and/or are interested in design education,
multidisciplinary teams, community-based design and service-learning.

What is EPICS?
Engineering Projects in Community Service (EPICS) is an engineering design program that operates in a
service-learning context. EPICS students earn academic credit for their participation in design teams that
solve technology-based problems for not-for-profit organizations in the local community. The teams are:
multidisciplinary – drawing students from across engineering and around the university; vertically-integrated – maintaining a mix of freshmen through seniors each semester; and long-term – each student participates in a project for up to seven semesters. The continuity, technical depth, and disciplinary breadth of these teams enable delivery of projects of significant benefit to the community. EPICS was founded at Purdue University in 1995 and has spread to eighteen other campuses. Purdue serves as the headquarters of the EPICS Program.