Engineering Design Learning through Community-Centered Sustainability Innovations

Abstract

Engineers must be prepared to address societal challenges with both technical skills and contextual understanding, yet middle-year undergraduate curricula often lack hands-on design opportunities. This study described a second-year, United Nations Sustainable Development Goal (UN SDG)-aligned project-based learning (PjBL) experience in which 43 students worked in teams to design and prototype devices addressing local sustainability challenges in waste, water, and energy. Student learning and perceptions were evaluated through post-project written reflections, which were analyzed using an inductive thematic approach. Reflections indicated that students developed stronger connections to their communities and shifted from viewing sustainability as a distant problem (‘they’) to seeing it as a shared responsibility (‘we’). These findings highlight how integrating UN SDG framing with hands-on design in middle-year courses can enhance learning and support engineering student development. The paper also discusses options for scaling and adapting the intervention across different courses and institutional contexts.