Teaching first year engineering students engineering design process and problem solving through service learning projects

This paper presents the authors' practice of teaching first year engineering students the engineering design process and problem solving through service learning projects (SLPs). The SLPs are embedded in the First Year Seminar in Engineering, a first semester freshmen level course that all engineering freshmen at Gannon University are required to take. The SLP, identified by the combined effect from the course instructors, the university SL director, and the project stakeholder, lasts for the entire semester. Students, divided into several design teams, are given very specific step-by-step design guidelines to follow. During the design process, students are practicing how to approach and interpret the engineering design requirements, formulate engineering problems, propose different designs, and eventually solve the problem and evaluate the final product. This paper will walk the readers through each step of SLP from instructing point of view. It will present the challenges faced by students and the instructors and how to overcome them. It will also report on the lessons learned from the project. The student assessment and course evaluation will be presented and discussed as well.