2019 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

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.