survey datacollection. Of the 11 institutions, the majority of the students, 72%, were male and 28% were female.Regarding race/ethnicity, 85% of the respondents self-reported the race/ethnicity as Black, 4% asHispanic, and 9% as multi-racial; 7% as Asian and 9% as White. Of the students involved, 16%indicated that English was not their primary language. The majority of the students were 2nd year(27%) or 3rd year (42%) higher education students; 67% of the enrollees were majoring in electricalengineering; 23% self-reported as computer science or mechanical engineering majors. Theremaining students generally reported majors related to other STEM domains for which the courseserved as an elective or to fulfil a minor requirement (see Table 1
features to promote viewer engagement.Table 1 lists key features of Camtasia. He assumes that most educators do not have a website fortesting teaching methods.Table 1. Features of Camtasia to Promote Create and Engage Content to ViewersCamtasia is both a screen capture and video editing software. Camtasia was targeted for theeducation market. The application evolved from being a program for software demonstrationsback in 2005 to a full-featured educational tool in 2015. Screen recording with Camtasiarequires a relatively small initial investment and logistics when compared to a video recordingstudio.After creating hundreds of videos using PowerPoint and Camtasia, the Professor ___ createdpersonal YouTube Channels 1 and 2 of Table 2, back in 2008
Guide Objectives1. IntroductionIn this paper, we report a case study on employing and adapting a pedagogy based on topicalguide objectives (TGOs) [1] in a senior-level undergraduate computing engineering course.According to this method, course materials are divided into a list of TGOs. Homeworkassignments are assigned to students at the end of every lecture. The assignments are designedexplicitly around the TGOs that have been covered by each lecture. Each TGO consists of alearning objective, a set of key-points and basic concepts, correlation among them, and one ormore exercise problems.Typically, engineering/science homework is in the form of a set of problems for students to solve.The drawback of this approach is that students often get
authors invited a guest speaker froman industry nearby to talk about practical applications in the SI field. The expected outcome is toproduce graduates with hands-on signal integrity experience, who will transfer to the workplacewith competitive skills and who will be positioned to extend their academic goals in graduateschool.The authors will also make the course content available to other programs, universities and nearbycommunity colleges. Moreover, the authors intend to align signal integrity course with the extensiveelectrical connector business in the Harrisburg area.1 IntroductionAs the speed of new digital designs are pushed into the gigabit ranges, interconnectsperformance becomes the key factor in enabling reliable system operation
the introduction to IoT lecture, and the hands-on BLEactivity. Student responses were typically in the form of selecting a numerical value or rank thatindicated their level of agreement on the six statements listed in Table 1, pertaining to theirexperience with the IoT session. Survey question #1 asked respondents to indicate their level of agreement on whether thesession was successful in demonstrating the confluence of Electrical and Computer Engineering, andthe corresponding responses are shown in Figure 1.a. It can be observed that 100 percent of therespondents agreed, ranging from strongly to slightly, that the IoT session highlighted aspects of bothdisciplines. While the hands-on activity was more inclined towards computer
devicesand for the MEMS/NEMS integrated systems used in high quality sensing systems. Thecourse also covers simulation and practical models for these devices. Some of the materialscovered in the course are structured from advanced textbooks [1] and [2], and lab manualsfrom different manufacturers [3] and [4].II. The Course Development2.1 Undergraduate research courses during the 2016 academic yearThe development of this course was achieved by providing senior students with researchand design experiences in related topic areas. The research experience from undergraduatestudents has been very productive. In Spring, Summer, and Fall 2016, the course materialswere developed. The materials included the TCAD simulation laboratory, IoT wearabledevice
significant way, namely that it is designed toprepare students for their upcoming courses more so than directly for their intended careers. Theemphasis in the readings is on both the relevance of EE as it pertains to technology that studentscan relate to, e.g., MP3 players, and to global problems, e.g., energy efficiency, as well as whatwill be taught in various courses that they will see in their next two or three semesters, and lesson “what an electrical engineer does in her/his career.”The course goals are listed and discussed below:1. Expose students to a wide range of EE-related topics. The choice of topics is necessarily limited by the constraints of a single semester, so it is not possible to discuss many of the areas of electrical
development of "Introduction to Embedded Computing," which provided avaluable model for both pedagogical approaches as well as laboratory and instructor resourcesthat would be required.7 All of these courses are taught in a studio style in which the laboratoryand lecture material are combined into a single cohesive period and in the same physical space,as shown in Figure 1. Each class meeting typically consists of a short lecture in which conceptsthat are relevant to the experiment are introduced followed by the experimental section of themeeting; all classes have both experimental, and lecture components and each course in thesequence is taught each semester. Educational research has demonstrated the effectiveness of hands-on project-based learning
academia for more than 15 years.Dr. Nicholas B. Conklin, Gannon University Nicholas B. Conklin received a B.S. in applied physics from Grove City College in 2001, and a Ph.D. in physics from Penn State University in 2009. He is currently an associate professor and chair of the Physics Department at Gannon University, Erie, PA. c American Society for Engineering Education, 2017 Assessment of Student Learning Experience in Two Exemplary Engineering ProjectsAbstractIn this paper, we examine and quantify similarities of two engineering projects each of which iseither 1) an undergraduate research project primarily integrating off-the-shelf devices and referredto as the
in STEM fields. 1,2,3 . Under the umbrella of active learning,however, a large variety of different (and sometimes contradictory) methodologies have beenproposed; including project-based learning, problem-based learning, gamification, tinkering,collaborative learning, class competitions, and many others. As educators become more interestedin student-centered pedagogies, the question of which specific techniques are most effective isincreasingly important.Because active learning is still an emerging paradigm, the number of studies examining distinctapproaches is somewhat limited, and the difficulty of isolating those techniques in the classroomenvironment is a recognized concern. 1 In this paper, we wish to contribute to the growing pool
, the paper discusses the student and instructor reactions to the course, lessonslearned, and suggestions for future offerings. The material developed for this course will beposted online so that other educators may use it in their teaching.IntroductionAutonomous vehicles and robotics are perennial hot-topics in the field of engineering. Roboticsare frequently used as a teaching tool at the K-12 level to draw students into STEM fields [1, 2]and Robotics Summer Camps and extra-curricular activities have even been created for K-12students [3, 4, 5, 6]. In higher education, although elements of robotics programs are found inmost engineering disciplines, including Aerospace, Mechanical, Industrial, Electrical andComputer Engineering, as well as
-testingenvironmentencouragesstudentstotryvariedexampleproblems.SeeFigure4.Asubsequentreviewofsolutiondetails(providedbyCATE)isalsoavailabletoillustratesolutiondetails,ifdesiredbyastudent.CATE’sactivelearningmodeandquizzingfeaturesareintendedtobothbuildstudentconfidenceastheyverifytheirabilities.Italsoprovidesacheckontheirlevelofmastery,astheyrealizewhattheydon’tknow.ThisfollowsguidancefromArnoldandMcDermott[2]establishedthatrereadingwithoutself-testingcanleadtooverconfidenceregardingperceivedmastery.FurthermoreBrown[3]suggeststhatattemptingtosolveaproblemandfailingisbetterthannoattemptatall.CATEprovidesasafeenvironmentforfailing,withnoconsequencestoacoursegrade.AlsoCATEcangeneratebillionsofcircuittopologies(forACcircuitswithdifficultylevel3).WorkbyRoedigerandKarpicke[1
, givingconsideration to the interconnectivity and integration of fundamental concepts across the program.This holistic approach emphasizes knowledge integration and weaves key threads throughout thecurriculum, stitching together and reinforcing relevant themes from the freshman to senior yearsas illustrated in Figure 1. Figure 1: Pedagogical and organizational structure of ECE curriculum in the RED projectTechnical courses in the middle two years represent significant challenges to students enrolled inthe ECE program. The amount of content covered increase significantly over time, and many stu-dents find it difficult to grasp the concepts because they are abstract and mathematically intense.Further, students often do not see the connections between
. When students come to class, they perform weekly labassignments. Because labs require students to collaborate in teams, the College of Engineeringidentified several challenges for delivering the course fully online in the future3. The paper willsummarize the results of the flipped classroom and its implementation using Google Docs andinteractive video for EE110.Grading results and course surveys were used to assess and improve the effectiveness of theflipped classroom over several course offerings. Various technologies include: (1) using worddocument with links to YouTube videos followed by with quiz questions in the first offering; (2)adding Google Docs (or Google Forms) with embedded YouTube Videos and quizzes in the nextclass session; and
. The students commented that thecourse material was easy to understand due to the lab experiments and demonstrations in theclass. Details of topics covered in our course, the circuit simulations done, measurements ofinterference signals under varying conditions, challenges faced and student feedback are alsopresented. 1. IntroductionThe course of Electromagnetic Compatibility (EMC) has been taught for many years at ourUniversity. We improved the course with new topics, simulation and experiments. The industryprojects that we did also helped us in improving course topics. The course outline and outcomeare given in Appendix A. The course required a lot of background related to electromagnetics,communication circuits and systems, measurements
offered. The course has long beenoffered without any specific training in sequences. In the fall of 2015 the course was modified to includeFinite State Machines (FSMs). With this change students are now trained to recognize the differencebetween combinational logic and state logic. Combinational logic is logic that is derived exclusively fromcurrent inputs and does not depend on previous inputs. State logic includes memory of previous eventsspecifically embodied in the “states”.Additional learning outcomes for the modified course are: 1. Recognize the difference between combinational and state logic 2. Recognize a sequence 3. Create a state diagram 4. Implement an FSM in Ladder Logic 5. Create outputs from FSM states 6. Test and
for thefinal two weeks when students focus on a final project. We use an 8-bit Microchip PIC16microcontroller, which has a simple RISC architecture with only 35 instructions. An outline ofthe course is shown in Table 1. The integral labs are shown in Table 2. These labs will vary abit from year to year, but each lab will generally cover the same concepts, with slightly differentimplementations. Each of these labs were completed using the C programming language. Thefinal project assignment was completed using assembly programming. Table 1. Original outline of course. Week Topics 1 Introduction, circuit review, software development tools, and
techniques and the lab portion of the course typically involvesstudents measuring voltages and currents in provided circuits with electronic test equipment.Two major problems arise with this method of teaching: 1. Students often do not see theconnection between what they are learning in lecture with what they are doing in lab and 2.Students often do not see a connection with what they are doing in lab with real-worldapplications. Without being able to directly implement what they learn in lecture to a practicaland useful real-world example or problem, students become disinterested in the subject and mayeven choose to leave the major.This paper discusses an attempt to modify the structure and content of an introductory electroniccircuits course to
below.1. Signal processing-MATLAB & SIMULINK12. Signal transmission-Microwave Office23. Data communication- Riverbed Modeler3 (formerly OPNET modeler)MATLAB is a high level programming language for technical computation. The softwareincludes computation, viewing, and programming in a user-friendly environment. AlthoughMATLAB has a user-friendly graphical user interface (GUI) interface, its functions are primarilyexecuted through commands. Therefore, the user must know these commands and the syntax ofthe programming language. Common uses of MATLAB include: a) plotting of complexmathematical equations, b) mathematical computations, c) algorithm development, and d)modeling and simulation.SIMULINK has an interactive environment that facilitates
hardware. For the Fall 2015semester, the class was transformed to utilize microprocessors and focus on hardware limitations.The transformation was done for primarily two reasons. 1) To advance the course’s curriculum.2) Improve student retention.Every day we interact with and are surrounded by embedded systems. From cars to microwaves,they have become an integral part of everyday life. It’s no surprise then that the area ofembedded system design has grown tremendously in the past few years [1]. More graduates areworking with microprocessors as a result of the growing embedded systems field and wouldbenefit from working with them and coding during their undergraduate coursework. Therefore, itwas decided that the courses’ new focus would be centered
other hand, did give anenormous amount of additional qualitative information about what kind of problemsthe teams were facing in their challenge.The outcome of the study is that none of the three methods proved to be superior, buteach one of them brings up useful data for future studies when combined. The paperwill introduce detailed recommendations in building and updating such ameasurement setup in a dedicated working space and analyze the gathered data inmore detail.BackgroundEngineering graduates’ employers expressed their concern because new engineerslack the capability and preparation to define and solve open-ended problems and inresponse, engineering design was increased in education. [1] An approach to teachingdesign to engineering
exercises withcomputer simulations. The computer simulations help, but have enough differences with realvoltage signals to hinder full understanding for some students.To provide direct analog and digital communication experience for students, Tim Hooperdeveloped the first version of Telecommunication Instructional Modelling System (TIMS) in1971. TIMS is a hardware training system, designed specifically for telecommunications andsignal processing courses that requires only an oscilloscope to use the system [1-3]. TIMS allowsstudents to experiment with real world electrical signals in a way that is doable andunderstandable for more students compared to utilizing only theory and simulations.Courses for undergraduate engineering students in
Math & CS, TrumanState University,1997 – 1999 Director of CAD Laboratory, Institute of Technology, PANDA ElectronicsCo., Ltd, 1995 – 1997 Electronic Engineer, Institute of Technology, PANDA Electronics Co., Ltd, 1995 –1997 Assistant Electronic Engineer, Institute of Technology, PANDA Electronics Co., Ltd, 1989 – 1996(c) Publications Five publications closely related to the project[1] W. Zhu & W. He, ”Wavelet Tight Frames for linear NURBs: Intervals”, Essays on Mathematics andStatistics, Volume 4, Athens Institute for Education and Research, November 2013. [2] W. Zhu, ”Themultilevel structures of NURBs and NURBlets on intervals: Monograph on NUMBlets modeling,” ISBN:978-3-659-19291-3, Lambert Academic Publishing, Germany, November 2012
, exams, reports, projects, etc.).Others eliminated all graded homework because 1) it is time consuming to grade homework and2) some students rely on other students or online resources for their answers. A few faculty didnot change their approach and either hired graders to cut down on their added workload ormoved on (went to industry or retired).In anticipation of increasing enrollments and higher university workload demand, we completeda series of 3 pilot studies4 in the 2013 -2014 academic year to evaluate methods to improvestudent learning for both local and distance students that would be sustainable in terms of facultyworkload. One of those methods involving the potential use of online quizzing as a partialreplacement for homework was
project activity provides the feedback necessary to assess the overallprocess and each project activity. Section 2 overviews the concept-to-product approach in the context of electronic circuitdesign and outlines the agenda and timetable of the workshop. Section 3 summarizes the projectactivities in electronic circuit design which were performed by the participants during theworkshop. Section 4 documents the outcomes of the workshop. Conclusions appear in Section 5.Section 2: Concept-to-Product CycleThe electronics industry survives on the successful implementation of the concept-to-productcycle. Figure 1 summarizes the cycle in terms of the following major phases. The concept isusually the formulation and exploration of one or more ideas
. c American Society for Engineering Education, 2017 Project Based Learning Curriculum for the Junior Year Based on Building a Laser Tag System Brad L. Hutchings and Stephen Schultz hutch@ee.byu.edu, schultz@ee.byu.edu Dept. of Electrical and Computer Eng. Brigham Young University1 IntroductionThis paper describes a Project Based Learning (PBL) curriculum 1 that spans the junior year of theElectrical and Computer Engineering Department. This curriculum consists of two, lock-stepsemesters. During fall semester all juniors (120+ students) enroll in three, four-credit-hour coreclasses: 1
in an Introductory Circuits CourseIntroductionThere are increasingly frequent calls to incorporate reflection into engineering education. Muchof the focus has been on the use of reflection in teaching design.1, 2 However, there have alsobeen efforts to incorporate reflective practices into courses which are not specifically focused ondesign. If we are able to incorporate reflection into what “the students learn engineering tobe”3—meaning, the engineering science courses which make up the vast majority of mostundergraduate curricula—reflection is expected to contribute to learning outcomes and students’development of metacognitive and social skills.4Because exams are generally used for formative assessment, they are rarely also leveraged as
maymodify and improve the system, contribute new experiments to the pool, and make theimprovements available to the educational community.II. backgroundRemote engineering labs for electrical engineering and other engineering disciplines are not new andhave been widely discussed in the literature and at previous ASEE conferences.[1-6] Typicalinstallations take advantage of the remote access capabilities of modern test and measurementequipment, combining them with software to manage student access, and a breadboard for thecircuitry. Nedic et al[7] compare remote EE labs using real hardware with labs based upon simulationtools, such as Labview© from National Instruments.[8] They reach no conclusion about whichmethod for creating off-site laboratory
. Y-circles are engaging in a process of discovery and inquiry to bridge theengineering education research-to-practice gap. Research studies have been planned and will beconducted to answer questions to understand (1) how educators involved in X-teams use designthinking to create new pedagogical solutions; (2) how professional formation pedagogy in themiddle years affects student professional ECE identity development as design thinkers; (3) howECE students overcome barriers, make choices, and persist along their educational and careerpaths in the middle years; and (4) the effects of department structures, policies, and procedureson faculty attitudes, motivation and actions.This paper describes the project, efforts that led up to the project
, biotechnology, micro/nano fab- rication and computer modeling. c American Society for Engineering Education, 2017 Robotic Outreach to Attract Primary and Secondary Students to EngineeringAbstractGraduate students and faculty at Auburn University’s Department of ECE developed an automatedNerfTM launcher for STEM outreach. This robot was created by the authors as a final designproject for a robotics course. The robot detects a reflective target using infrared light and tosses aNerfTM ball at the target. The robot was initially demonstrated to a Title 1 middle school roboticsgroup working on a competition robot at the university. This opportunity allowed for a preliminaryoutreach event