Leah Jamieson - Engineering Projects in Community Service

In Fall 1995 Jamieson and her Purdue colleague Edward J. Coyle founded Engineering Projects in Community Service, an academic engineering design program that operates in a service-learning context. The program, which was initially offered only at Purdue, is available at present in 18 universities. It offers students from multiple disciplines with the opportunity to be part of engineering project design teams that work with nonprofit community organizations. The teams provide technological solutions to challenges faced by the community organizations and their target audiences. Examples of EPICS projects include the Spanish In Action Project at Butler University, which provides students with a web-based computer game that helps them learn Spanish vocabulary; and the Sensor Network Air Pollution Monitoring project at Drexel University that allows measurement of diesel particulate concentration in Philadelphia’s neighborhoods. For founding and administering EPICS, Jamieson has received in 2005 the Bernard M. Gordon Prize for Innovation in Engineering and Technology (with colleagues Edward J. Coyle and William C. Oakes). In 2008 the EPICS program has announced EPICS High, an extension of the program’s scope to integrate high school students in the design teams. .

Read more about this topic:  Leah Jamieson

Famous quotes containing the words engineering, projects, community and/or service:

    Mining today is an affair of mathematics, of finance, of the latest in engineering skill. Cautious men behind polished desks in San Francisco figure out in advance the amount of metal to a cubic yard, the number of yards washed a day, the cost of each operation. They have no need of grubstakes.
    Merle Colby, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)

    But look what we have built ... low-income projects that become worse centers of delinquency, vandalism and general social hopelessness than the slums they were supposed to replace.... Cultural centers that are unable to support a good bookstore. Civic centers that are avoided by everyone but bums.... Promenades that go from no place to nowhere and have no promenaders. Expressways that eviscerate great cities. This is not the rebuilding of cities. This is the sacking of cities.
    Jane Jacobs (b. 1916)

    I am convinced that our American society will become more and more vulgarized and that it will be fragmentized into contending economic, racial and religious pressure groups lacking in unity and common will, unless we can arrest the disintegration of the family and of community solidarity.
    Agnes E. Meyer (1887–1970)

    His character as one of the fathers of the English language would alone make his works important, even those which have little poetical merit. He was as simple as Wordsworth in preferring his homely but vigorous Saxon tongue, when it was neglected by the court, and had not yet attained to the dignity of a literature, and rendered a similar service to his country to that which Dante rendered to Italy.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)