Conference Session

Unique Courses & Services for Freshmen

Collection

2004 Annual Conference

Authors

Michael Thompson; William Oakes

addressed for future semesters, all of the community partners indicated interested incontinuing next year. Some of the concerns and changes they suggested included timing of theprojects, many wanted longer projects. Some requested fewer teams so that they could workmore closely with them. These changes are being considered as plans are being made for thenext year’s program.Conclusions Service-learning was successfully implemented on a large scale in a first-yearengineering program as a curricular tie between three clustered courses as part of a learningcommunity. Students report a high level of satisfaction with their overall experience. Asignificant majority would choose service-learning over a traditional project given the choice

Conference Session

Emerging Trends in Engineering Education

Collection

2004 Annual Conference

Authors

Stani Vlasseva; Valentin Razmov

again were themain learning tool. Others provided helpful comments on some of the project deliverables (e.g.,user and technical documentation, status reports, etc.). Finally, one of the students helpedorganize a tour of Microsoft where a panel of program managers and developers gave shortpresentations and answered questions. At the time of this writing, our host has graciously agreedto provide a similar experience to the current class too.Guest feedback came primarily in verbal form, and was provided during the respective classsessions. In several notable cases the experts willingly engaged students additionally by postingfollow-up emails to the class mailing list as well as by individually mentoring some of themafterwards.The main measure of