ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the possible combination of educational and social objectives in interdisciplinary project work, which is the sort of study most likely to give engineering students the chance to engage themselves with problems of the socially underprivileged. The involvement of undergraduates in the process of applying knowledge as they acquire it requires work in the form of projects, rather than as set experiments associated with a traditional course of lectures, seminars, tutorials, etc. Illustrations of community-related projects are given from a scheme of group projects undertaken by electrical engineering students at Imperial College. The present discussion of the concept of the humane application of knowledge in community service, as it applies in engineering education, will concentrate on a scheme of interdisciplinary group projects carried out by electrical engineering students at Imperial College. Projects concerned with the humane application of knowledge in community service should, hopefully, benefit people other than students.
