EPICS Program

The EPICS (Engineering Projects in Community Service) program, founded at Purdue University in 1995, has been recognized for teaching multidisciplinary design through service-learning. EPICS is a curricular structure of design courses that support long-term partnerships with local or global community organizations. Students engage in the development of projects that span the engineering disciplines and often require multiple semesters or even years to complete. Software engineering has played a key role in the projects since its founding. Although most of the EPICS course divisions are paired with specific partners, the software divisions have been organized to work across partnerships and focus on similar technologies that can be shared with several community partners. The success of the Purdue EPICS program spawned similar programs at other universities and, more recently, high school programs.