Launching Futures to New Heights

By Anjum Nayyar, The Bulletin

When first-year Chemical Engineering student Mark Macchia thumbed through his course descriptions, he had no idea one of them would lead to something that would change his outlook on professional life—and have the potential to improve the lives of many others.

As part of his year-long Engineering Strategies and Practice (ESP) course, Macchia is working with a team of five other first-year Engineering students to help design a kitchen for the Horizons for Youth shelter in Toronto. It’s part of a new service-learning approach being promoted at U of T to expose students to socially conscious scholarship and give them the tools to enhance their critical thinking and problem-solving skills.

“They don’t have all that much cabinet space so we’ve been looking at ways to install different kinds of doors that slide over so they can swing the cabinets further out to give them more space,” Macchia said.

The Centre for Community Partnerships and the Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering have project partnerships with up to 150 service organizations and community groups in an effort to improve the student experience—a key objective—of the University’s Stepping Up academic plan.

“It made it feel like I was contributing something to the community instead of just coming to school and learning math and science,” Macchia said. “It’s a real world problem and we’re helping solve this problem.”

Up to 1,000 Engineering students are enrolled in the mandatory course this year, according to Professor Susan McCahan, the previous Course Coordinator and Chair of First-Year Engineering.

“It gives the students an opportunity with people beyond their instructors and this is really important for the students,” said McCahan, whose teaching team for the course won the 2007 Alan Blizzard Award for collaboration in teaching. “For us, from the point of view of teamwork, communication and design, it gives context to learning those things in a real authentic way that you can’t get from an assignment taken out of a book.”

McCahan said the course format was modeled on a Northwestern University first-year Engineering course. Students are set up in teams that mimic those in an industry setting with a project manager who is a faculty member. The course is designed to teach students competency in six areas: the basics of problem solving, systems thinking, project management, teamwork, the social impact of technology and professional communications skills. Students attend standard lectures and tutorials and seminars.

Macchia said working the shelter provides real hands-on experience. “We took the problem of the entire kitchen and broke I up into several sub-problems. Everyone took two of these and came up with ideas on how to solve them. We put ideas together and decided together which ideas were the best for the client.”

The Engineering Strategies and Practice course was developed in 2003 by Professors Susan McCahan, David Bagley, David Kuhn and Subbarayan Pasupahty, led by Professor Will Cluett. A pilot of the course, coordinated by McCahan, was launched in 2003-2004 and it became a mandatory course in the Engineering curriculum in 2005-2006.
 

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