EPICS Engineering Projects in Community Service
Student Information


Getting involved in EPICS and getting credit for it!

Starting in Spring 2001, EPICS projects were made available to ME and EE undergraduate students for credit taking the Capstone Design Projects through ME415 and EE403W. These classes are typically taken 7th semester or later.
The long-range goal is to have EPICS projects available to students throughput their academic career, including:
  • first year, as a one credit First Year Seminar
  • sophomore and junior year as one or two credit technical electives
  • senior year as a capstone design experience or as technical elective for up to three credits
If Penn State follows the Purdue "model" for EPICS, the EPICS team will eventually include students from all Colleges at Penn State, including Business, IST, Education, Health and Human Services, etc.

 
 
Engineering students interested in EPICS projects can do the following:
  • contact the Engineering Advising Office (208 Hammond), expressing interest in EPICS and getting the latest information about courses with an EPICS design element.
  • contact your Department's Undergraduate Advisor, expressing interest in EPICS projects
  • get involved in local non-profit organizations on either a volunteer or paid basis, and look for product or services needs of the organization. If you find a product/service need, do one of the following:
      •  
    • submit an EPICS project proposal via this web site
    • contact the EPICS co-ordinator
    • Dr. Ken Jenkins (Electrical Engineering Dept. Head)
Non-engineering students are encouraged to contact Dr. Ken Jenkins with your interest in EPICS, as well as your Department's Undergraduate Advisor.

 
Example EPICS Projects
We need students help to identify EPICS projects! Below is a list of EPICS projects that have been highly successful at Purdue - meaning challenging projects which ran for multiple semesters, with highly "usable" deliverable from the student teams to the non-profit organizations.
  • Complex play environments for young children with physical disabilities, including cause and effect play, multisensory stimulation, motion, speech stimulation, and control of the playhouse
  • Remote controlled locker opener for disabled middle school/high school students
  • Signal processing projects, including:
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    • Speech rate and pace measurement and feedback
    • voice interactive children's software
    • microphone array interface to hearing aid to reduce extraneous background noise
    • microphone array to monitor cafeteria noise levels/types
    • virtual tour of history museum
    • museum image archive
For even more ideas - go to Purdue's EPICS web page (http://epics.ecn.purdue.edu/) and click to Projects & Teams - Delivered Projects.

Updated: Aug. 27, 2001