1. Civic Engagement in Action Team Maddie: Educational Assistant Zach Miller Clint Cartwrigh Aaron CoX James Norwood AND Ram Luitel
ENGR 120 Intro to Engineering,
Spring 2010
Instructor: Carol Sevier
Problem Statement: create an Educational Assistant for Maddie that allows her to be more self-reliant and provides her more focus during lesson plans.
Service Project purpose : To develop creativity, critical thinking and problem solving skills by identifying and analyzing real world problems and solving those problems through engineering concepts on multi-disciplinary teams .
Service Learning Activities: Before trying to solve the problem we first met Maddie and her teacher in order to completely understand what needed to be done. From this meeting we were able to create a list of functions that our design needed to have.
Function
Requirement
Ability to keep her focus
Isolated environment: learning devices that invoke interest
Ability to be cleaned
Used clean materials that are easily sanitized
Durability of Materials
Long-lasting; ability to withstand prolonged use, ability to withstand abuse
Portability
Weight must be no greater than 25 lbs; Dimensions must be no larger than 24”x30”x8”; height adjustable
Summary: Both Maddie and her teacher were excited about our prototype, as we continue to put the finishing touches on our final design. We are confident that the end result will be something that Maddie should be able to use and enjoy for a long time.
From this list of Functions and Requirements we were able to build a prototype that we presented to Maddie to gauge her interest.
What We Learned
From this project we learned to develop critical thinking skills, to respect others ideas and the importance of time management. This project allowed us to see how real world experiences can follow an engineering design process in order to build a solution for community based problems. Finally, we were able to help someone else besides ourselves and hopefully give both Maddie and her teacher more freedom to learn and teach.