Assessing Curriculum Improvement Through Senior Projects

Senior project and/or capstone design courses are intended to provide a culminating design experience for students and to demonstrate their understanding of engineering knowledge and their ability to apply that knowledge to practical problems. It is expected that the quality and attributes of students’ senior design projects can be used as a good measure of determining how well the curriculum prepares students to engage in engineering design as well as a measure of faculty teaching and student learning. This paper reports the results of a study designed to assess whether the new computer engineering curriculum implemented at Cal Poly over the previous five years has had a positive impact in preparing students for engineering design through measuring the quality and complexity of senior design projects. A randomized complete block design was used in the study. Ten senior projects each were randomly selected from the population of three groups: computer engineering senior projects completed in the 2002-2003 academic year, computer engineering senior projects completed in the 2007-2008 academic year, and electrical engineering senor projects completed in the 2007-2008 academic year. A senior project evaluation rubric was developed to assess the quality and complexity of the senior projects. Members from the Computer Engineering Industrial Advisory Board used the rubric to score the randomly selected senior projects. The scores assigned by the advisory board members were compared to the letter grades assigned by faculty advisors for these senior projects. The results of the analysis show that the overall quality of computer engineering senior projects improved from academic year 2002-2003 to academic year 2007-2008. However, there is a statistically significant difference in the overall senior project grades assigned between faculty advisors as compared to senior project scores assigned by the advisory board members. The results also indicate that the rubric developed from this study is robust since different evaluators did not have a statistically significant effect on the grading of senior projects

A Project-Based Electronics Manufacturing Laboratory Course for Lower-Division Engineering Students

This paper presents a project-based laboratory course on electronics design and manufacturing. The goal of this course is to provide lower-division engineering students a hands-on experience involving actual printed circuit board (PCB) design, layout, fabrication, assembly, and testing. Through project-based learning, students not only learn technical skills in designing and manufacturing an electronic device, but also develop their project management and communication skills early in their course of study at the university. The course outline and examples of the student projects are presented in this paper as well as project evaluations and students’ feedback. This paper also presents the selection of a PCB design tool for the lower-division electronics manufacturing course

Curricular Enhancement to Support Project-Based Learning in Computer and Electrical Engineering

Undergraduate computer and electrical engineering programs often partition the curriculum into several courses based on related topics taught in isolation. Students are expected to synthesize their knowledge in a senior design project. It is the authors’ experience that students often struggle during their senior design project since they have not gained the appropriate knowledge or mastered necessary skills needed to work on a significant or team-based engineering design project. Specifically, students need to be able to define system requirements, partition the design into subcomponents, design, build, test, and verify that the system requirements have been met. The authors have enhanced and implemented three courses to develop system engineering knowledge and skills that better prepare students for their senior design experience. This paper gives an overview and lists the learning outcomes for each of these courses and includes some examples of laboratory projects that are used to meet these learning outcomes

Enhancing Student Learning Through State-of-the-Art Systems Level Design and Implementation: The development of a lower division learning module

The Cal Poly/Allan Hancock team is developing a learning module that will allow all lower division engineering students to design, fabricate, assemble, and test an electronic system implemented on a printed circuit board (PCB). All the services necessary to perform this laboratory experiment will be provided with low-cost vendors available on the . The learning module is being developed so that it can be integrated into the existing electrical engineering lower division courses that are required by all engineering students. The laboratory learning module will use operational amplifiers (op amp), resistors, capacitors and other common electronic components to study the theory of op am circuits, and to apply these circuits to the interfacing of electronic signals with the physical world. The learning module will replace two existing laboratory experiments on op amps with a five week exercise. After lecture on the theory, the five week exercise will consist of one week of laboratory introducing the PCB technology and the PCB design tool. Outside of class, the students will submit their designs (after instructor review) to a vendor for fabrication, and order their parts. After about three weeks, the students are expected to have received the fabricated PCB and to have assembled the parts on the PCB. On the last week, they will test their board and perform the experiment. Thus, this learning module will be compatible with current course/lab schedules, and could be conveniently incorporated into an existing course/lab to meet and extend the existing laboratory learning objectives

Development and Assessment of a PCB Layout and Manufacturong Laboratory Module in Introductory Electric Circuits for EE and Non-EE Majors

In standard introductory electric circuits laboratories for electrical engineering (EE) majors and non-EE majors, prototype boards are typically used to construct and test electric circuits. Students typically do not learn how to design and manufacture Printed Circuit Boards (PCB) that are commonly used in more sophisticated design projects and other engineering applications. This paper will present the development and assessment of a PCB layout and manufacturing laboratory module that has been used in introductory electric circuits laboratories for EE and non-EE majors. The feasibility of integrating the new PCB layout and manufacturing module into the electric circuit course will be discussed. An experiment has been designed and conducted to assess the impact of the PCB module. A survey with questions from the Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaire (MSLQ) supplemented with additional questions was used to measure students’ motivation and the impact of the PCB module on student learning. In Winter quarter of 2009 at Cal Poly, two lab sessions for sophomore and junior non-EE engineering majors were taught by an instructor with an experimental group that designed a real PCB for one of their circuit design experiments and a control group that implemented all of the experiments using prototype boards. In Spring quarter of 2009 at Cal Poly, two lab sessions for EE majors at the sophomore level were offered by the same instructor with an experimental group that designed and built a PCB for one of their circuit design experiments and a control group that performed all experiments using prototype boards. Data have been collected and analyzed for these four student groups. Results indicate the inclusion of the PCB module did not impact the student’s ability to achieve any of the course or laboratory learning objectives. Though no statistically significant difference in student’s motivation was found between the experimental group and the control group, the results strongly indicate that students enjoyed the introduction of the PCB design module. Furthermore, students report they have a higher confidence in their ability to design printed circuit boards and they are more likely to design PCBs in other course projects as part of their senior projects

Evaluation of the Telecommunications Protocol Processing Subsystem Using Reconfigurable Interoperable Gate Array

The current implementation of the Telecommunications Protocol Processing Subsystem Using Reconfigurable Interoperable Gate Arrays (TRIGA) is equipped with CFDP protocol and CCSDS Telemetry and Telecommand framing schemes to replace the CPU intensive software counterpart implementation for reliable deep space communication. We present the hardware/software co-design methodology used to accomplish high data rate throughput. The hardware CFDP protocol stack implementation is then compared against the two recent flight implementations. The results from our experiments show that TRIGA offers more than 3 orders of magnitude throughput improvement with less than one-tenth of the power consumption