Designing for the disabled in the engineering classroom

Service learning in the classroom has been shown to provide great benefit to students and their communities. During the fall of 2009, a national design competition for the disabled was integrated as a service learning term project in Montana State University´s Industrial Engineering Department course entitled “Ergonomics and Safety Engineering I.” This project provided students with hands-on experience in applying both their hard and soft skills (based upon the ABET a-k outcomes) in designing for special populations. Students used the concepts learned throughout the course in order to develop an assistive device that would empower people with disabilities to overcome barriers to employment. Each student group was assigned a person with a disability and a vocational aid. The students designed assistive devices that enabled the workers to perform their jobs with greater ease and efficiency and in some cases with complete independence. In order to encourage a more widespread adoption of service learning within engineering, this paper provides one application of a service learning project that can be applied across a variety of engineering domains.