Toy Adaptation for Children with Disabilities: A Translatable Means to Engage Engineering Students in Community Engaged Learning

Oct 15, 2026

Community engaged learning offers educational benefits and is a strong way to involve diverse engineering students. This paper introduces toy adaptation for children with disabilities as a new community engaged learning tool, reporting student feedback on enjoyment, perceived engineering impact, and increased connection to engineering. Results show especially strong benefits for female students, who felt more empowered and more often recognized positive engineering effects. The approach is highly translatable due to its short duration, low cost, and use of existing community networks, supporting developmentally essential toys for communities.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages19

Reading Time48 min

AccessFree to download

Abstract

Introduction

Background: Community engaged learning and service learning

Challenges in adopting community engaged learning

Proposed approach: Toy adaptation for children with disabilities

References

| | Ad | vances in Engineering Edu | cation | | | | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | SPRING 2021 Toy Adaptation for Children with Disabilities: A Translatable Means to Engage Engineering Students in Community Engaged Learning MOLLY Y. MOLLICA University of Washington, Seattle, WA RACHEL LOUIS KAJFEZ AND ELIZABETH RITER The Ohio State University Columbus, OH ABSTRACT Community engaged learning has demonstrated educational benefits and is an especially promising method to engage a diverse group of students in engineering. In this work, we present toy adaptation for children with disabilities as a novel community engaged learning tool. According to students surveyed, this process is enjoyable, demonstrates the impact of engineering, and makes students feel more connected to engineering. Female students were especially impacted by toy adaptation, feeling more empowered by the experience, finding the experience more useful, and more often seeing the positive impact of engineering. Additionally, toy adaptation is highly translatable due to its short-term nature, low cost, and opportunity to leverage community connections through existing networks. Given the widespread need for adapted toys, the translatability of toy adaptation, and the overwhelmingly positive student feedback, we anticipate that toy adaptation will engage students in circuitry, inspire diverse students to pursue engineering, and provide developmentally essential toys to communities. Key words: service learning, experiential learning, student diversity INTRODUCTION Incorporating community service into education provides opportunities for students to apply academic content while helping others. Community engaged learning, which grew out of general community service by universities, allows for bidirectional collaborations between the university ADVANCES IN ENGINEERING EDUCATION Toy Adaptation for Children with Disabilities and the community which are mutually beneficial (David J. Weerts and Lorilee R. Sandmann 2008; Roper and Hirth 2005) . Research on service learning, which is typically discussed as a pedagogical approach to community engaged learning (Butin 2010), has found it enhances classroom learning (Eyler, Janet; Giles, Dwight E. 1999), student retention (Tinto 1987), community connections (Eyler, Janet; Giles, Dwight E. 1999), personal development (Eyler, Janet; Giles, Dwight E. 1999), and professional skills (Shelby et al. 2013) while also being a way to effectively deliver curricula (William Oakes et al. 2002; Duffy, Tsang, and Lord 2000) . Further, this type of student engagement is a promising method to engage diverse students in engineering because societal impact has been shown to be especially important to diverse groups in career selection (Giddens et al. 2008), and service learning courses are particularly attractive to students from diverse groups (Davis et al. 2014; Rader et al. 2011) . In response to research on the benefits of community engaged learning, universities have created new engineering courses and have incorporated community engaged learning experiences into existing courses as early as the first-year (William Oakes et al. 2002) . For example, Louisiana State University incorporated service learning into a first-year engineering course by tasking students with playground design and construction. This project provided an engaging method for teaching engineering standards and safety codes while providing a new playground for local children (Ropers-huilman, Carwile, and Lima 2005) . Similarly, the University of Colorado included service learning in optional first-year design courses by integrating design-build projects for community members with disabilities (Piket-May and Avery 1997, 1996) . Programs like EPICS at Purdue University start in the first year and can expand throughout the students’ undergraduate education (W. Oakes and Spencer 2005) . These experiences hav

FAQs

What is the main goal of toy adaptation in this paper?

It presents toy adaptation for children with disabilities as a short-term community engaged learning tool to engage engineering students while making engineering meaningful to the community.

What benefits did the surveyed students report?

Students reported that the process was enjoyable, demonstrated the impact of engineering, and helped them feel more connected to engineering; female students reported especially strong empowerment and usefulness.

Why is toy adaptation described as highly translatable?

Its short-term nature, low cost, and ability to leverage existing community connections (e.g., clinics, schools, nonprofits, libraries) make it easier to implement across different settings and classes.

Oct 15, 2026

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