Matt Gentry | The Roanoke Times

Virginia Tech freshmen engineering students Tommy Burton (left) and David Caldwell read a thank you card while manning their booth at Tech's engagement expo in Squires Student Center. The expo showcased community service projects students participated in during the year.

BLACKSBURG -- Reformatting computers for a community service group. Devising a system to measure nutritional value at a food pantry. Designing a memorial for town employees.

Not your typical freshman engineering class assignments. But hundreds of Virginia Tech engineering students spent the semester doing those projects and ones like them as part of a new program to combine design and problem solving with community outreach.

ROXIE -- Real Outreach Experiences in Engineering -- kicked off this semester and involved 900 engineering students broken into 185 teams. The top 39 were on display Thursday at Tech's annual engagement expo, showcasing community service projects students participated in during the year.

Tech's college of engineering partnered with the university's service learning center and VT Engage -- a university community service effort started last fall -- to launch ROXIE. With 900 freshman engineering students, they had to cast a wide net for projects.

But Karen Gilbert, coordinator for VT Engage, said there were plenty of organizations that came forward with ideas. And when it came time for the online signup, students were sitting at their computers counting down the seconds so they could get their top choice.

"We underestimated their enthusiasm," she said.

When Thomas Caldwell heard that Beans and Rice Inc., the Radford-based community development organization, wanted help fixing computers, he had an immediate reaction.

"Ooh, I've done a lot of work with computers. I built my own computer," he thought. "We could do this."

On Thursday, his group's display included a thank you card from the organization for the 177 hours of work the group put in cleaning memory, updating and installing new operations on 24 computers.

Katie Masoero said her group thought their math skills could be put to work to help Second Harvest Food Bank in Salem. The food bank needed to create a system to report nutritional value of their food to the federal government this summer. Team member Ben Sharp breezed through an explanation of the complicated combination of charts and matrixes Thursday. The end result was a numerical nutritional value for different foods, based on things such as calories, fat and sodium contained per serving.

"The food bank goes out and helps people in need," Masoero said. "Usually our project is some kind of hypothetical. So the fact that this is real and helping real people, I thought that was neat."

The projects were part of an exploration of engineering design class, a workshop and lecture taught by five professors. Students had to produce plenty of documents with engineering terms such as "house of quality" and "morphological matrix."

But Nathan Sharpes said one of the things he learned beyond engineering jargon and its application was simply how to communicate with people who aren't engineers. He and his team designed a memorial for the town of Christiansburg to honor police officers and public works employees who have died while on the job. They worked with Christiansburg director of human resources Clay McCoy, talking through the town's needs and the most important qualities of a memorial. They ran several scenarios for tributes through a methodical process before settling on an arch that would span two brick pillars in front of the entrance to town hall.

McCoy said the plan isn't something that would go before the town council anytime soon, but he was impressed and passed the plan on to Town Manager Lance Terpenny.

"The idea they came up with was totally different than anything I would've come up with myself," he said. "They had a lot of enthusiasm and energy."