Teaching computer systems performance analysis

A course on computer systems performance analysis has been adapted for several different distance education delivery options, including an interactive television system, face-to-face presentation at a satellite campus, and delivery over the Internet to independent study students. Of the 122 students who have enrolled in this graduate-level course for a grade over the three-year period analyzed, half have been nontraditional students who never set foot on campus. These remote students have a substantially higher drop-out rate than the traditional on-campus students, and frequently indicate a strong preference for face-to-face instruction in a traditional classroom setting. Nevertheless, due to significant differences in the characteristics of the two student groups, the remote students typically earn higher final course grades than the on-campus students. While there is a strong demand for delivery of this type of advanced course to remote students, more still needs to be done to effectively engage these students in the learning process     

An Experiment with Support Programming of a Textbook

A textbook in solid state electron physics for undergraduates in, electrical engineering has been programmed by a method of "support programming." Instead of re-editing the entire book, as is usually done in programming, the textbook has been left intact and the program has been assembled in a separate booklet. This booklet is planned for use in conjunction with the textbook, each page in the booklet corresponding to an identically numbered page in the textbook. This method has considerable advantages in cost and flexibility over the conventional method, and leaves the textbook intact for future reference use. An unavoidable drawback is the limitations that it naturally places on the program construction, for example, in that the sequence of reading is not well controlled. The method has been evaluated in connection with a regular undergraduate course at Chalmers University, Gothenburg, Sweden. The results were measured in the final examination which was based on the textbook exclusively. Students using the programming had, on the average, 34 percent higher grades than the students not using the programming. Comparing only students not attending the regular scheduled teaching, the corresponding figure was as high as 62 percent. The main advantage seems to be that the teaching can be extended also to students who for various reasons study on their own and therefore miss the regular teaching support of their studies.     

An electromagnetics course with EMC applications for computerengineering students

When computer engineering students follow a different (separate) program of study from the electrical engineering students, only a single course in engineering electromagnetics can be accommodated in the computer engineering (CE) core program. An outline for a course on electromagnetics for computer engineering is given combining traditional electromagnetics topics with definitions, concepts, and discussions drawn from EMC. In this way engineering electromagnetics is made relevant and vital for the CE student. Specific EMC topics are included as they arise in a presentation based on a standard engineering electromagnetics text. Shielding, radiated emissions, susceptibility, the electromagnetic environment, EMC test methods, open sites, shielded anechoic rooms, screen rooms, TEM cells, and EMC test antennas are discussed. The goal of the computer engineering electromagnetics course is to prepare the student for a full-scale EMC course to be taken as an elective in the final undergraduate year or the first year of graduate study     

Bioelectric Measurements: Research Preparation with Experimental Realism

The details and philosophy of an interdisciplinary course that combines bioelectrical measurements and research preparation are described. This lecture-laboratory course is offered to students in bioengineering, electrical engineering, and biology in an attempt to provide some of the modern tools, techniques, and experiences necessary to perform quantitative experimental research. A systematic approach to research is used to guide the student to a final independent investigation of a problem of his choice. The combination of measurements and research experience of an interdisciplinary nature, for students with widely varying backgrounds, presents some rather unique advantages and difficulties that may be of interest to educators.     

Integrating Microelectronics into the Engineering Curriculum

A one-semester integrated microelectronics projects laboratory for junior-level electrical engineering students is described, which serves to educate the student in the physics and technology of microelectronics. The first third of the course is devoted to prescribed introductory experiments. In the final two-thirds of the semester, the student pursues a project of his own design. The curriculum of a first-year graduate course in microelectronics is also outlined.     

Instructional objectives and bench examinations in circuitslaboratories

For a three-course sequence of required circuits laboratories, the author has written detailed instructional objectives. These behaviorally observable goals focus student learning on the educational objectives selected by the course supervisor. They summarize the concepts, relationships, and measurement skills presented in the course. During a bench final examination, the student randomly selects one or more of these instructional objectives and demonstrates mastery to the teaching assistant. This encourages the student to master all instructional objectives in order to succeed in the course     

An automated feedback system for computer organization projects

This paper describes a system, built and refined over the past five years, that automatically analyzes student programs assigned in a computer organization course. The system tests a student's program, then e-mails immediate feedback to the student to assist and encourage the student to continue testing, debugging, and optimizing his or her program. The automated feedback system improves the students' learning experience by allowing and encouraging them to improve their program iteratively until it is correct. The system has also made it possible to add challenging parts to each project, such as optimization and testing, and it has enabled students to meet these challenges. Finally, the system has reduced the grading load of University of Michigan's large classes significantly and helped the instructors handle the rapidly increasing enrollments of the 1990s. Initial experience with the feedback system showed that students depended too heavily on the feedback system as a substitute for their own testing. This problem was addressed by requiring students to submit a comprehensive test suite along with their program and by applying automated feedback techniques to help students learn how to write good test suites. Quantitative iterative feedback has proven to be extremely helpful in teaching students specific concepts about computer organization and general concepts on computer programming and testing.     

A Semiconductor Technology Course

A one-year semiconductor technology course for undergraduate senior electrical engineering students is described. The course consists of one semester of lecture followed by one semester of laboratory. The material covered in the lecture is demonstrated to the students by field trips to local industry and in their laboratory. Highly sophisticated technology such as ion-implantation is demonstrated in field trips and technology such as thermal diffusion is encountered by the student in his laboratory course. "Thus, whenever possible, the student can relate his lecture material to observation. The laboratory consists of a complete processing operation where the student starts with a crystal boule and fabricates a packaged device whose terminal characteristics are measured. He or she thus obtains some feeling for the effects of processing on terminal characteristics. Projects are used in conjunction with the laboratory to improve some of the process steps and to give the student some experience in tackling nonstructured problems which are more closely related to professional activities after graduation.     

American Vacuum Society Short Courses for Scientists, Engineers, and Technologists

Short courses, which are taught intensively by the American Vacuum Society (AVS) for one, two, or five days, represent the most important media for disseminating new educational material on the nature, maintenance, and utilization of the vacuum environment. The development of the AVS course offerings is traced from offering one course to 80 attendees in 1969 to an availability of 38 courses and over 2400 attendees in 1983. The topical content of the courses available is listed, and their relationship to the AVS chapter and divisional structure is reviewed. The means used to develop courses, to select the sites for presentation, and to monitor course quality are discussed. The different management plans used at various stages of growth of the short course program are identified and the economic impact of the AVS program on the Society is discussed. Of all who attend AVS courses, 85 percent of the course registrants are not members of the AVS. The background, professional tasks performed, type of employer, and the challenge of the diversity of student backgrounds for classroom teaching are discussed. The AVS experience can serve as a model for any science-related technical society to develop or expand a continuing education program in its topical area of interest.     

The comparative evaluation of excellence for student awards

A recurring problem in the award of academic honors is the comparison of the highest grade achieved by students from different groups with different traditions, practices, and evaluation scales. Group averages are not useful because it is the position of the top student that is of interest, not the average; also, the normal distribution cannot be assumed for the upper tail of the distribution, which must be obtained from the data. We find that the upper grades of each group can be modeled very well, permitting the statistical theory of extremes to be used. From the model which we fit to each group separately, we obtain the probability for a top grade at least as high as the one observed, and from this, we obtain the return period which is the expected interval before the return of a similarly high grade. This return period is a common measure which enables top grades from several disparate groups to be compared on the basis of how rare or exceptional they are as members of their own group. The precision of the return period is estimated from the correlation coefficient of the regression model and used to indicate the effectiveness of the decision in a particular case. The method is applied to data from different disciplines at the University of Waterloo, including comparisons among Engineering Departments     

Video Tape Lecture-Demonstrations in a PSI Course

Color video tapes were prepared for each unit in a personalized system of instruction (PSI) electronics course to present background material, survey concepts, and demonstrate hardware. The 20 min tapes were provided to students as an optional learning resource of which 40 percent of the students chose to use. These tended to be students who use the resources available to obtain a higher grade in a PSI course than they might otherwise obtain in a lecture course. Use of the tapes had no effect on study habits or student motivation.     

Specific processing of the spontaneous EMG. Detection andclassification of multiplets using self-organizing neural networks

To the authors' knowledge, their study is the first approach to a quantitative study of spontaneous EMG. Using the given algorithm, the spontaneous EMG firing that occurs in spasmophilia has been studied on a quantitative basis, and clinical preliminary results have confirmed it as a useful tool to make the diagnostic process more sensitive, and to help in the quantitative analysis concerning clinical correlation with different pathologies. After a classification of the multiplets is performed, the final maps may be used, together with other clinical and paraclinical data, as tools the clinician may rely on in monitoring the patient's status and eventual effects of therapy. In a study on thyroidian pathology with signs of spontaneous EMG activity where 41 subjects were investigated, the program based on the authors' algorithm allowed the dynamic quantitative monitoring of the impact of the modifications of the plasmatic concentration of the thyroidian hormones on the P-Ca metabolism in order to properly initiate and conduct the therapy. The authors' quantitative approach seems promising for further use in clinical practice; it is a distinct noninvasive quantitative EMG examination that can be used by the physician in conjunction with other laboratory and clinical data     

Programmed Instruction for Use of the Oscilloscope

Programmed instruction is being used to teach use of the oscilloscope in the first electrical engineering laboratory course at the University of Texas. A programmed text was developed that breaks down the process of operating a scope into a series of logical steps starting with deflection of the electron beam and continuing through proper use of the triggering controls to measure the phase difference between two waveforms. Students take from 8 to 45 hours to complete the program, which requires both preparation and laboratory work. Results from practical examinations and observation of student performance in later courses indicate that students learn to use the oscilloscope more effectively from the program than from conventional laboratory instruction. Use of programmed instruction in the first course assures that every student learns to use the oscilloscope and provides for a wide range of individual abilities.     

Electrical and computer engineering curriculum assessment via senior miniproject

Traditionally, senior capstone projects have been used for comprehensive student assessment. Other mechanisms exist for engineering course assessments, such as teacher/course evaluations, homework and test results, student office visits, and senior exit interviews. Each of these methods has weaknesses if the primary objective is curriculum improvement. The new Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET) Engineering Criteria 2000 (EC-2000) accreditation process requires new methods to allow for continuous program improvement. This paper discusses the six-week miniproject for senior students in the Electrical and Computer Engineering program at Bradley University. Use of the miniproject to steer the curriculum design content has been in place for eleven years. The evaluation results have been used successfully to implement course, laboratory, and curriculum modifications. The paper discusses the project, its costs, evaluation procedures, curriculum modifications and improvements, and use of the project in the EC-2000 accreditation process.     

Implementing a Remote Laboratory Experience Into a Joint Engineering Degree Program: Aerodynamic Levitation of a Beach Ball

This paper details a successful and inexpensive implementation of a remote laboratory into a distance control systems course using readily available hardware and software. The physical experiment consists of a beach ball and a dc blower; the control objective is to make the height of the aerodynamically levitated beach ball track a reference trajectory by manipulating the voltage to the blower. MATLAB/Simulink coupled with xPC Target serve as the controller platform, while Microsoft NetMeeting and standard Internet video conferencing equipment are used to interface the distance-learning students with the laboratory equipment. Both local students at North Carolina State University's campus in Raleigh and distance students at the University of North Carolina at Asheville completed the laboratory experiment. In a student survey, distance students participating in the lab remotely rated the experience as favorably as local students. Course grades, including the design project grade, were similar between the two groups.      

Introducing TCAD Tools in a Graduate Level Device Physics Course

The impact that project complexity, student prior academic achievement, and quality of instructional materials might have on student academic achievement was studied during a required device physics course, in which technology computer-aided design (TCAD) tools were introduced to first-year graduate students. Preliminary analysis of student performance and project complexity showed that students who attempted the most complex projects had the lowest student academic achievement, despite there being no significant differences in prior academic achievement as measured by grades in the first exam in the course. Further analysis of student achievement data from other electrical engineering courses taught in a similar open laboratory format, for which enhanced instructional materials were developed, suggest that when well-developed learning resources are easily accessible to students, project complexity has no negative impact on student academic achievement and can sometimes enhance student academic performance. Cognitive load theory was used to explain why well-developed instructional tools, such as enhanced tutorials, can help students better learn or work with complex material.      

Concept maps for engineering education: a cognitively motivatedtool supporting varied assessment functions

Assessment in the context of education is the process of characterizing what a student knows. The reasons to perform assessment are quite varied, ranging from a need to informally understand student learning progress in a course to a need to characterize student expertise in a subject. Finding an appropriate assessment tool is a central challenge in designing an assessment approach. The focus of this paper is on the use of concept maps for both course-level and program-level assessment in engineering education. Concept maps, which are node and arc representations of the relationships among concepts, provide one means to represent student knowledge. This paper presents background on concept maps and describes uses of concept maps at both the course and program level     

Numerical solutions and mapping of electrostatic fields using theApple MacIntosh computer

The popularity, user-friendliness, and accessibility of personal computers encourages their use as powerful computational tools for numerical and graphical aids in the visualization of concepts that may seem abstract to students. Methods are presented for using the Apple MacIntosh computer for the numerical solution and mapping of fields for electrostatics, steady current flow, heat transfer, and source-free magnetostatics problems. The programs are totally menu-driven, consistent with the familiar MacIntosh interface, requiring minimal time on the part of the student to learn how to get into the program and obtain results, yet with enough power and versatility to enable students to do some fairly sophisticated computations if they wish. The program uses a finite-elements method and provides transient as well as steady-state solutions. This software is proving to be a valuable instructional aid in field mapping problems and the computation of capacitance and resistance in a first-level EM course     

Understanding of mathematics and science: efficient models forstudent assessments

Student self-reports provide information that is invaluable in assessing student backgrounds and achievements. These critical student inputs can be used to help place students in beginning courses; to identify high-risk and honors students; to evaluate the quality of courses, services, and resources; to initiate and evaluate existing and new programs; and to help students make career decisions. Faculty members can also use self-reports to efficiently examine student perceptions of their understanding of key content at the beginning and end of the courses for which they are responsible. This paper uses as a model: self-reports of first-year engineering students using the Mathematics Science Inventory (MSI). The MSI is used in placing students in beginning mathematics and chemistry courses and to evaluate their perceptions of their understanding of the key content of these courses. Significant, but differential self-reported gains in mathematics and chemistry knowledge are reported in twelve different math and chemistry courses, completed by 1995 and 1996 beginning engineering students. Complex, but generally positive, relationships are observed between course grades and pre-test and post-test self-reports of understanding of math and science content     

绝缘子污秽度等级判断新方法

设计了一种可代替人工判断的绝缘子污秽等级辨识方法,并基于新标准IEC 60815-1：2001给出的盐密、灰密与现场污秽度的对应关系,开发一个绝缘子污秽度等级判定程序,利用采样点的盐密值和灰密值,以最小二乘法拟合污秽等级的分界曲线,来确定绝缘子的污秽等级。实践证明,该方法不仅提高了工作效率,而且准确性比人工判断要好。