Experiences in Service Learning as Capstone Courses

The impact of engineering skills in the community must be understand by practicing professionals. During the course, a way of introducing students to these relationship is promoting active learning through community service. Our implementation of service learning differs from academic credit for volunteer work, requiring that the service work done must be related to classroom concepts. In this paper we present four capstone courses projects developed by students in Informatics Engineering (loosely defined as a mix of Computing Science and Software engineering in our University). Each project is based in real society needs, some of them obtained by interviewing potential users and some from requirements published by government agencies. The service learning approach provides an interdisciplinary experience that combines analysis, implementation, design, and testing while helping students learn experimental skills not introduced in previous laboratories.