Reflections on Service Learning Lessons with Trinity Eco Prayer Park in Dr. Haugtvedt’s Fall 2025 STEM Communication for Public and Technical Audiences Course

Krista Burkman

Service learning is beneficial in many ways, from learning more about a local organization to seeing the impact one person or a group of people can have on a community. The project we completed in Dr. Haugtvedt’s Fall 2025 ENGL 289 does just this. Through working to help the Trinity Eco Prayer Park find potential solutions to one of their problems, I learned how a person or a group of people can have a larger impact on the community than I previously thought.

One of the issues the park is currently facing is finding ways to utilize its website to show off all the park has to offer and recruit donors. I spent time reading articles to learn more about the different audiences the park would like to reach and the content each audience prefers. After compiling all my newfound information, I was able to compose a recommendation for the park board. This included several options for creating strong and effective content for their website, which can also be used on social media platforms if the park were to utilize them.

Even though this may seem like something small, this will help the park improve its website and be more well-rounded when trying to create content to entice viewers. This also helps them gain donors, which then helps the broader Rapid City community. The park may have the funds to continue doing upkeep, general maintenance, and taking on new projects to update or improve the park. The park board’s mission is to bring together people in Rapid City. By maintaining the park and creating a safe environment for residents and visitors of Rapid City, they continue to bring people together and strengthen the community.

Eddie Johnson

I spent most of my time on this assignment researching the content that can be put on websites to encourage viewers to contribute to the establishment. From what I found I was able to recommend that the park update their content to make the website more current with the goal of evoking more interest in community members. This project was very meaningful to me because I was able to work on my technical presentation and project management skills with a project that served a greater customer than just a business. This project was aimed at helping the community of Rapid City as a whole.

Tristan Enders

Our group researched search engine optimization and found key ways to further explore Google’s algorithm to have it show Trinity Eco Prayer Park content to as many people as possible. We researched visual aesthetic and how to encourage positive engagement on a well-designed site. Finally, to wrap it all up, we researched what it means to maintain all of this into the prolonged future for retention of visitors, community interest, tourism, and for best use of the services the Park pays for and provides. This experience was a beautiful one that led us as students to discover things about the local community we didn’t pay much attention to before. It led us to obtain attunement, precision, and consideration when researching topics to put together a report that represents our commitment to our work. I relate this to my degree, civil engineering, because we are required to ensure the most professional and precise engineering standards in our work because it will affect other people’s safety, quality of living, and overall experience in a negative way if we do not pay attention to these things, which will be very costly.

Ty Brady

My favorite aspect of the service-learning project was working directly with our client (Trinity Eco Prayer Park) to propose upgrades and changes to their website because working with an actual client presented obstacles that an engineer may not have seen immediately. This introduced an opportunity for us to shift our view from numbers and calculations to human values and ideas. Every step along the path of the project was done with the client in mind, which guided a lot of our decisions. Balancing the available resources and values of clientele is a very important part of being an engineer and this project helped to guide us in how to approach that in a real-world application.

We learned that creating a successful proposal isn’t just about finding the most effective and efficient option at the cheapest cost. It also must include the values of the client and their vision of what the project should be. This is why we included a multitude of options for each of our proposal points. This allows the client to balance their values and decide what they align with the most before making a final decision.

Student Biographies

Krista Burkman is a Junior Mechanical Engineering Student at the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology.

Eddie Johnson is a Senior studying Metallurgical Engineering at South Dakota School of Mines and Technology. He is a part of the varsity track and field team at school and enjoys exploring the Black Hills in his free time outside of school and athletics.

Tristan Enders is a Junior studying Civil Engineering at South Dakota Mines.

Ty Brady is a Junior Mechanical Engineering student. He has over 6 months working in internship roles for engineering companies and he is excited to share his experience gained from this class.