**Author details**

*New Innovations in Engineering Education and Naval Engineering*

**7. Conclusions**

**Acknowledgements**

**Conflict of interest**

and personally.

also a strategy. For example, with the LSU Community Playground Project [33, 41], once community-designed playgrounds are built at public schools, a company that subcontracts with the school system to provide grounds and maintenance services to the schools takes over the maintenance of the playgrounds. On-going communication among the playground project, the school system, and the company ensures

Done well, service-learning based engineering design can yield a rich array of benefits for engineering students and communities. However, faculty must carefully plan their course and partnership in order to achieve the full potential of SL-based design. Engineering faculty and students should enter into the design process from a mindset of humility and listening, being respectful, and embracing the expertise of the community. This positioning is often different from the techno-centric, "expert" perspective that pervades engineering. To instill this human-centered or empathic design perspective in students, their first formal education on the engineering design process should promote these views. This approach can perhaps grow into participatory design in the senior year. One challenge is the fact that many engineering faculty members have not previously experienced such approaches, either during their education and training, or in practice. Fortunately, the literature provides rich examples for faculty to draw from to implement this methodology in their own courses. We believe that best practices in service-learning in engineering design make our students better engineers and enables our profession to fulfill its highest purposes.

The authors gratefully acknowledge our community partners and academic collaborators over the years, from whom we have learned and grown professionally

This work was partly supported by the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture (LAES project #94261). Publication of this chapter was funded by the

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest related to this work.

University of Colorado Boulder Libraries Open Access Fund.

that playgrounds are re-designed, built, and maintained based on need.

**28**

Angela R. Bielefeldt1 \* and Marybeth Lima2

1 University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, CO, USA

2 Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA, USA

\*Address all correspondence to: angela.bielefeldt@colorado.edu

© 2019 The Author(s). Licensee IntechOpen. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
