On the structure of a multipurpose introductory course in computerarchitecture at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute

In this paper, the authors describe the structure and contents of an introductory course in computer architecture that is designed to meet multiple objectives and offered to the first year graduate students and senior undergraduate students at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute, USA. The objectives include providing a solid background in computer architecture to senior undergraduate students, providing prerequisite preparation for advanced computer engineering courses to the graduate students, and offering a self sufficient study of the computer architecture field to those students who do not pursue further courses in the field. Appropriate projects integrated into the course and public domain tools that were used to facilitate the project assignments are described. The paper describes important issues that were addressed in designing the course structure and its contents. The effectiveness of the approach presented in this paper is supported from experience that has resulted after multiple offerings of the course over a period of three years     

The Role of Project Work in the EE Curriculum: Experience at Worcester Polytechnic Institute

The relation of the undergraduate project program at Worcester Polytechnic Institute to some common problems of curriculum development is described. In particular, the ways in which project work addresses the difficulties of teaching design, the provision of helpful laboratory experience, and the introduction of new technical knowledge, are discussed. Further, it is argued that the process of engineering, as exemplified in a well-thought-out and completed project, is a vital part of engineering education. Details of the implementation, conduct, and results of a project-oriented curriculum are presented, based on eight years of experience in the Electrical Engineering Department at WPI.     

Real-time systems course in undergraduate CS/CE programs

Interactions with industry hiring new software engineers from undergraduate computer science and engineering programs show, case after case, that universities do not pay enough attention to the practical aspects of software development. Another well-known deficiency of the undergraduate programs is in the area of time-critical, reactive programming. The present paper describes a senior course in a computer science undergraduate program designed to address some of the above problems. The real-time course provides the students not only with the basic concepts of real-time programming, but also provides a vehicle for development of small class projects which address methods, tools and the critical aspects of a modern software development life cycle. The experience with teaching the course may serve as a model for similar offerings in other computer science, computer engineering and software engineering college programs. The paper describes lessons learned and future plans     

Assessment of a case study laboratory to increase awareness of ethical issues in engineering

Case studies in engineering ethics were integrated into a first course in electrical and computer engineering at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI), Worcester, MA, with the primary objective of increasing students' awareness of ethical issues in the workplace. During a three-hour "laboratory" period, students read and discussed three short case studies in engineering ethics, focusing on understanding the differing viewpoints of individuals within a case and identifying multiple courses of action for resolving the issue. The effects of the laboratory were assessed via student focus groups and surveys. All focus group participants agreed that their awareness of ethical issues in engineering was enhanced by the laboratory. In contrast, the survey results were equivocal, showing improvement in the students' awareness of ethical issues; however, the particular questions found to differ statistically pre-intervention versus post-intervention were not consistent between course offerings.     

A Microcomputer Laboratory and Its Courses

A new microcomputer laboratory within the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Clarkson College is described. The laboratory, while not changing the conceptual goals of the existing courses, has had a positive impact on these courses, particularly the introductory ones. The laboratory has made possible two new courses: a microcomputer course for all engineering and science students, and a project-oriented course for seniors in electrical and computer engineering. The course changes and new offerings are discussed and evaluated.     

An undergraduate parallel processing laboratory

A modest transputer laboratory was established at the Electrical Engineering Department, Louisiana Tech. University. This laboratory is used to introduce undergraduate electrical engineering students to parallel processing. The author discusses course development and then describes five laboratory experiments: introduction to Express, node analysis, event driven profiling, performance analysis, and matrix multiplication     

Microcomputers for Data Acquisition, Control, and Automation?A Laboratory Course for Preengineering Students

A general engineering laboratory course featuring microcomputer interfacing for data acquisition, control, and automation is described. This course, available to all junior engineering students at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, was developed and run for 220 students in the Spring semester of 1984. The goals of the course were to: 1) provide experience in engineering problem solving and design; 2) teach and provide "hands-on" experience in the fundamentals of data acquisition and control using microcomputers; and 3) illustrate significant physical principles and engineering processes. The course included a short series of lectures on the fundamentals of microprocessors and the underlying theory of data acquisition (including sampling theory, signal conditioning, and analog-to-digital conversion). An extensive laboratory manual was developed to serve as the primary means of instruction. Three series of experiments were developed for this course. The microcomputer familiarization series gives the student background and experience in the use of the operating system commands, the high-level programming language, and how to use these in real-time application for data acquisition and control. The process control series is a problem-solving exercise in the instrumentation, control, and automation of the heating-mixing tank. The robotics series consists of the instrumentation, control, and application of a laboratory bench robot in a materials handling system. The implementation of this laboratory and its first offering are discussed. Problems involved with the equipment and the manual are presented. Student evaluations indicate the course was a success and faculty feedback is similarly positive.     

Accommodations for the Microprocessor

Expansion within electrical engineering, due largely to the development of the microprocessor and its applications, is a major source of challenge confronting the electrical engineering educationalist. In the following, observations on selectivity and the adoption of a theme in undergraduate programs are discussed. Developments in laboratory equipment and associated laboratory-based tuition in digital systems at the Ulster Polytechnic are described.     

The evolution of the WPI Advance Space Design Program-an evolvingprogram of technical and social analysis using the NASA Space Shuttlefor engineering education

In December of 1982, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, with the cooperation and support of the Mitre Corporation, initiated a primarily undergraduate educational program to develop experiments to be flown onboard a NASA Space Shuttle. Christened the MITRE WPI Space Shuttle Program, it sponsored the development of five educationally meritorious experiments over a period of four years. Although the experiments were ready to fly in early 1986, the Challenger disaster delayed their flight until the Spring of 1991. The delay notwithstanding, the benefits of the first program were sufficient to justify the development of a second set of experiments. More comprehensive in scope, this new venture, named the Advanced Space Design Program, addresses both technical and social areas of interested related to space flight. The authors present a general historical overview and self-assessment of WPI's space design programs     

A Summer Graduate Program for Electrical Engineering Faculty Members

Few formal programs have been developed with the specific goals of enabling faculty members to further their education in new and developing technical areas and to work towards advanced degrees in a planned sequence of summer courses. A summer graduate program for electrical engineering teachers was instituted in 1962 at Worcester Polytechnic Institute as a result of many months of discussion in the ASEE Division of Electrical Engineering of how best to serve a critical continuing education need of faculty members, particularly in the smaller and sometimes isolated engineering schools of the nation. In six years of operation, the summer graduate program has enrolled 91 students from 71 different schools in 31 states, Puerto Rico, and five foreign countries. Many participants had no specific degree goals. However, in this period six have completed M. S. degrees and seven have earned a Ph.D. degree. Twelve additional faculty members are well along on their doctoral programs. Most doctoral students spend at least a year on the Worcester Polytechnic Institute campus doing their research, although provisions are made for their research to be done at their own schools in some cases. The upgrading accomplished by the program is evident from the jobs many of the participants accepted at the completion of their programs. The summer program is beginning to attract increasing numbers of participants from technically oriented junior colleges. The program concept is applicable to faculty members in most or all engineering disciplines.     

Microprocessor-Based Projects at Worcester Polytechnic Institute

Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI), Worcester, MA, has an unusual educational environment based, in part, on the successful completion of a substantial project by each student in his/her major field. To meet the microprocessor (?P) computational needs of graduate thesis students and undergraduate project students in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Biomedical Engineering, several reusable 8085-based ?P systems have been developed for project applications. The support and use of these systems is described within the context of the required undergraduate project and graduate thesis format. Finally, several projects are described to illustrate the wide range of applications and capabilities of our systems.     

A new introductory electrical engineering curriculum for thefirst-year student

This paper reports on the author's experience with respect to a major revision of the introductory Electrical Engineering curriculum at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. The new curriculum incorporates classroom and laboratory experience in electrical engineering for first-year students. The new courses are based on the “spiral” approach to education in which concepts are introduced at an applications-oriented level, and then repeatedly revisited with successively greater levels of detail and theoretical sophistication. The plan that has been adopted was the result of extensive study within the department in which current students and alumni participated through surveys. An assessment plan and preliminary assessment results are discussed     

Innovative methodology to improve the quality of electronic engineering formation through teaching industrial computer engineering

An innovative educational methodology adapted to the requirements of a new era with new societal and industrial challenges for electronic engineers is proposed in this paper. This active methodology, known as the Educational Innovation Project (EIP), is being studied in the Electronic Engineering (EE) degree of the Higher Technical School of Design Engineering at the Polytechnic University of Valencia, Valencia, Spain. The main objective of the EIP methodology is to improve the process of teaching and learning in order to increase student success. To accomplish this objective, the EIP method addresses various issues. From an organizational viewpoint, different structural aspects of the EE degree have been adapted, such as balancing and integrating lectures and laboratory sessions, advancing into interdisciplinary studies coordinated among all the subjects of the course, and strengthening the work in teams to tackle real engineer problems. The industrial computer engineering (ICE) subject is taken as a reference to show how these aspects have been applied. Regarding the faculty, lecturers participate in an open and permanent process of further training; attitudes toward cooperation and exchanges of experience among them are promoted; and research and reflection on new methodologies is encouraged. One of the challenges of the implementation of the EIP project is the development of multidisciplinary projects by team workers. The knowledge acquired from all the subjects is put into practice through the development of a common project to undertake real engineering problems.     

A sophomore capstone course in measurement and automated data acquisition

A novel multidisciplinary course (Engineering Applications III) was developed that integrates knowledge gained and tools acquired from the introductory freshman circuits, mechanics, and C/C++ courses. It is built around the concepts associated with automated data acquisition systems. This three-quarter-hour, laboratory-intensive course uses a suite of data acquisition equipment located in the computer aided teaching laboratory at the University of Denver, Denver, CO. The presentation format is two lectures and one three-hour laboratory per week. The lectures are designed to cover material that directly supports the laboratories. Early in the course, laboratories explore the subsystems of an automated data acquisition system. The students then learn the operation of a PCMCIA (personal computer memory card international association) data acquisition card, write C/C++ programs to control the data acquisition, learn the operation of analog-to-digital and digital-to-analog converters, and learn the use of the C/C++ commands provided for controlling these subsystems. These concepts are introduced while doing typical experiments dealing with the measurement of temperature and strain and the evaluation of a temperature controller.     

Playing It Straight

The author shares his personal experiences at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute relating to all aspects of the campus life of black students both at the graduate and undergraduate level. There are certain clear-cut guidelines that must be developed if any program is going to work and not only increase the number of minority students entering engineering programs, but also improve the probability of their completing their programs and graduating. A basic element of the successful program is openness and frankness-"lay out all cards on the table."     

RF and microwave design courses at Georgia Tech

A four-course upper-level undergraduate sequence in RF (radio frequency) and microwave design offered by the School of Electrical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology is described. The goal of these courses is to provide students with a good background in basic and advanced principles and design techniques applicable to RF and microwave engineering problems. The course objectives and structure and a topical outline are given for each of the courses     

An updated PC-based assembly language programming laboratory

An undergraduate computer engineering laboratory that supports a one-quarter, PC (personal computer)-based assembly language programming course is described. The course sequence is required for the computer engineering and is taken as a technical elective by many students in electrical engineering. The novel features of this state-of-the-art laboratory include a symbolic debugger with support for Assembly and high-level languages, a local area network of PCs, online documentation, and a RGB projector for interactive classroom demonstration     

An inexpensive PC-based laboratory configuration for teachingelectronic instrumentation

The need for enhanced undergraduate laboratory teaching aids has been identified by the staff of the instrumentation laboratory at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of the West Indies. Although there are currently a number of interesting and powerful educational products on the market, they are typically produced in the developed countries and are sometimes inappropriate for applications in developing countries. They are also often very expensive. This paper describes a laboratory configuration and a set of tools designed and implemented at the University of the West Indies for undergraduate instruction in electronic instrumentation. The laboratory configuration encompasses a number of personal computer (PC) stations and model engineering systems. The model systems mimic realistic engineering processes under interrogation and control from the remote PC stations. A set of inexpensive hardware tools for data acquisition and control of the model systems, as well as for general laboratory test and measurement, are described. Useful software tools are also mentioned     

A new undergraduate computer arithmetic software laboratory

An undergraduate computer engineering laboratory that supports a one-quarter computer arithmetic course is described. This course is required for the computer engineering degree and is taken as a technical option by many students in electrical engineering and computer science. The features of this state-of-the-art laboratory include a local area network of computers, remote access via the campus network, electronic mail, online documentation, and automatic program submittal, grading, and plagiarism detection     

Laboratory Experiments in Surface Acoustic Wave Devices and Their Applications

This project relates to the development of three novel laboratory experiments for electrical engineering seniors enrolled at the Polytechnic Institute of New York introducing them to surface acoustic wave (SAW) devices and their applications. Major developments in this new technology have taken place during the past decade. SAW devices now play a significant role in the signal processing area and industries' strong interest in this new technology is now evident. The first experiment in the series demonstrates the fundamental behavior of SAW devices using the delay line structure. The second experiment relates to the measurement of the complex impedance of the SAW interdigital transducer. The third experiment demonstrates how the SAW device can be used to perform the function of convolution and correlation.