Community learning component in first year seminar

This Work in Progress paper describes current efforts to engage Liberal Art College freshman to the Engineering discipline and its impact to the broader community, through a topic-based, writing-intensive seminar course. In this particular seminar developed by the author, we aim to discuss the role of engineers in tackling challenges in the Community around the Hartford area and beyond. While students enrolled in the seminar course in this paper are mainly “undecided” students, we believe by emphasizing technologies applied to the immediate community around our students and humanitarian applications, we can inspire students´ interest in Engineering and show students how the skills they will be learning can have a positive impact on the quality of life for the surrounding community. The seminar was assessed by gathering student comments concerning each major course components.