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Engagement in Practice: An Engineering Service-Learning Course in Collaboration with an ART 2D Design Course to Serve Young People on the Autism Spectrum Using the Touchboard

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Conference

2019 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Location

Tampa, Florida

Publication Date

June 15, 2019

Start Date

June 15, 2019

End Date

June 19, 2019

Conference Session

Designing Opportunities for Youth Engagement in STEM

Tagged Division

Community Engagement Division

Page Count

9

DOI

10.18260/1-2--32708

Permanent URL

https://peer.asee.org/32708

Download Count

355

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Paper Authors

biography

Yanjun Yan Western Carolina University Orcid 16x16 orcid.org/0000-0002-5152-6614

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Yanjun Yan received her B.S. and M.S. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Harbin Institute of Technology (China), and the M.S. degree in Applied Statistics and the Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from Syracuse University. She is an assistant professor in engineering and technology at Western Carolina University. Her research interests are statistical signal processing, diagnostics, and particle swarm optimization.

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biography

Mary Anna LaFratta Western Carolina University

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Mary Anna LaFratta is an artist, designer and design and arts educator in graphic design in the School of Art and Design at Western Carolina University. She has worked with students and faculty in multidisciplinary and mulitmodal projects for more than twenty years. She has participated in projects funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Art Education Foundation, and the National Science Foundation. Recently, her graphic design students worked in collaboration with the School of Music and the National Nanotechnology Initiative in making short animations to explain various aspects of nanotechnology, and designing and developing non-digital games for learning, reading and speaking Cherokee focused on its use of pronouns while partnering design students with faculty and students in the Cherokee Language program and the Eastern Band of the Cherokee Indians in western North Carolina. Both the nanotechnology animations and the Cherokee word games has been distributed to large and multifaceted audiences nationally.

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Hugh Jack P. Eng. P.E. Western Carolina University Orcid 16x16 orcid.org/0000-0003-4299-8561

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Dr. Jack is the Cass Ballenger Distinguished Professor of Engineering and Department Head of the School of Engineering and Technology within Western Carolina University. His interests include robotics, automation, and product design.

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Lane Graves Perry III Western Carolina University

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Lane Graves Perry, III (PhD, ME, MEd, BBA) currently serves as executive director of the Center for Community Engagement and Service Learning at Western Carolina University, a Carnegie Community Engaged campus. His reserch interests include community engagement/service-learning, global citizenship development, and public health.

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Abstract

This course is the first designated “Service-Learning Course” from the College of ¬¬¬Engineering and Technology at ______________. The course is to be offered in the Spring (Jan-May) 2019, and will be the first Service-Learning project between the School of ¬¬¬Engineering + Technology and the School of Art and Design. The service-learning project involves interdisciplinary student teams consisting of upper-level engineering and technology students and entry-level art and design students working together to mentor young clients on the autistic spectrum at ______ in the local community. The course will use Touchboards, these are essentially Arduino boards that are programmed with the Arduino IDE for user-friendly interfaces. Commonly these boards are used with conductive paint that is applied with a brush to create an artistic drawing resulting in a circuit that reacts to human touch to trigger a user-specified sound or other actions. The team has created a sample design and used it at outreach activities. This has shown that the Touchboards will be manageable for new learners under our students’ mentoring. Team members met with the Farm clients in Summer 2018, and are preparing a studio for the clients to visit the campus in Fall 2018. However, the courses are to be offered in Spring 2019 to allow additional time to gather project materials and develop exercises. The project will provide new avenues of expression for the autistic clients and new opportunities for the engineering and art students to learn to apply their discipline knowledge in real-world applications, to practice collaboration, to develop mentoring skills, to critically reflect upon their learning, and to integrate sound, technology and visual graphics into interactive two-dimensional compositions. For the clients at the ______, it is an opportunity for them to work directly with university students on the university campus and to engage in experiential learning by making and designing a two-dimensional composition that extends the boundaries traditional design. The initiation of this idea started more than two years ago, and has been shaped by many discussions between the schools, and one authors participation in the ______ Institute during the 2017-2018 academic year. So far, the team has obtained about $3000 of internal funds and are awaiting an external funding decision to fully materialize this interdisciplinary Service-Learning project. This project will focus on 2D design, and hopefully lead to a future course on 3D interactive design.

Yan, Y., & LaFratta, M. A., & Jack, H., & Perry, L. G. (2019, June), Engagement in Practice: An Engineering Service-Learning Course in Collaboration with an ART 2D Design Course to Serve Young People on the Autism Spectrum Using the Touchboard Paper presented at 2019 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition , Tampa, Florida. 10.18260/1-2--32708

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