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A Novel Course To Provide Electrical Engineering Experience To Freshmen Students

Hirak C. Patangia University of Arkansas at Little Rock hcpatangia@ualr.edu

Abstract

An experiential learning course centered around an intellectually inquisitive project has been designed to introduce freshmen students to the field of elect rical engineering, and also to provide the students with a head start for the beginning engineering courses they will take later in the curriculum. The course has a heavy emphasis on laboratory activities with an equally strong focus on ‘just-in-time’ theory relating to the concepts central to accomplishing the project goal. The prerequisites for the course have been kept at a minimum to make the course accessible to any university student who wants to explore engineering as a career.

Introduction

In a traditional engineering curriculum, students devote their freshmen year to taking math and science courses to prepare them for the engineering courses to come later in the curriculum. Such an approach is often dry and not motivating to the freshmen since they don’t see any application courses. In addition, the students have to wait a year or more to know if the major they have chosen will meet their career goals. The traditional ‘introduction to engineering’ course that generally surveys various engineering career paths is insufficient to provide the freshmen students with a feel for their major. As an alternate, many engineering programs have started offering project-based courses under various titles at the freshmen level to introduce students to the field of their study. A leading institution to introduce such an approach in the ECE curriculum is Carnegie Mellon University, and they have successfully offered an ‘intellectually substantive’ course with basic algebra and high school physics as prerequisites 1.

Unlike the courses specifically designed to provide freshmen experiential learning to the majors admitted into a program, the course described in this paper has the following objectives:

- The course is accessible to any university student who has knowled ge of basic algebra and who wants to explore electrical engineering through experiential learning. - The course will provide a ‘taste of electrical engineering’ for the students to decide if they indeed want to major in the field of electrical engineering. - The course will have a significant intellectual component that will prepare them for courses to come later in the curriculum. - The course will provide significant laboratory experience for the students to be competent in the use of basic electronic instruments. - The course will focus on engineering creativity for students to stay motivated in their field of study.

Proceedings of the 2002 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition Copyright © 2002, American Society for Engineering Education

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Patangia, H. (2002, June), A Novel Course To Provide Electrical Engineering Experience To Freshmen Students Paper presented at 2002 Annual Conference, Montreal, Canada. 10.18260/1-2--11347