2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Engineering emphasizes service and public welfare as core to the discipline. New generations of engineering students envision service and social impact work as significant components of their future careers. However, engineering education prioritizes traditional academic learning outcomes and approaches, which often do not include community engagement or service. Service-learning is a form of community engagement applied in classrooms that pairs well with traditional engineering academic learning outcomes. By addressing this gap in engineering curricula, it can prepare students for their professional roles in the workplace. Here, we introduce an upper-division undergraduate elective civil engineering course that integrates both Service-Learning and the Engineering Design Process. The course involved working with a local community partner, who desired aid in designing and implementing an environmentally sustainable worm-composting bin. Students engaged in hands-on activities, including woodworking and engineering design, enhancing their practical skills and understanding of community engagement. We analyze pre-course and post-course student survey responses and find increases in student knowledge, confidence (i.e., self-efficacy), and perceived usefulness of course concepts (i.e., academic learning outcomes). We also observe students exhibiting increased awareness and connection to their own social identities and recognition of them as strengths in their future careers (i.e., personal outcomes). Further, although we discover a consensus among young engineers regarding their dissatisfaction with current global and local sustainability efforts and feelings of climate anxiety, we also find increases in students’ hope in spite of these barriers after the course (i.e., social outcomes). Cumulatively, these findings indicate that a service-learning course in sustainability engineering can lead to increased learning outcomes, which align with the current needs for and desires of early engineers.