Engineering students devise new course

Last year’s electrical and systems engineering seniors saw a hole in their department’s curriculum and designed a course to fill it.

For the past few years, ESE freshmen could not take an introductory course about their major until their second semester, when they start ESE 170 or 171. Last spring, a small group of juniors and seniors in the ESE department designed a syllabus for an introductory ESE course for first semester freshmen. The resulting course was Electrical and Systems Engineering 111 — “Atoms, Bits and Information: Introduction to Electrical and Systems Engineering.”

“We didn’t have anything right off the bat [to show] what electrical and systems engineering is to get people excited about the discipline. That was something we felt was missing in the curriculum,” said Nicholas Howarth, an Engineering senior in the ESE program and the lead coordinator of the course. Howarth was part of the small grassroots movement of juniors and seniors who designed an initial syllabus and pitched it to the department.

“They said that [students] needed an overview and to be introduced to the department quicker. [This course] was in response to that,” said ESE professor Daniel Lee, who taught the course last fall.

It wasn’t clear until late July that the course would be offered at all. At that point Howarth sat down and wrote a revised syllabus for the course, which is open to any freshman engineer.

He explained the course provides a perspective “from the atomic level … all the way to the systems level.” For instance, he said, the topics would include the functioning of silicon circuits as well as “the global internet, social networks and how to model things on a global scale.”

The course includes a series of guest lecturers to introduce students to various facets of the discipline. There is a possibility that these lectures will be made into a Coursera course.

“The idea would be that we would have all these videos from professors in the department giving lectures about … their research and different topics in electrical and systems engineering,” Howarth said. “And anyone would be able to watch those and participate in that regard.”

The course also includes a lab section, which is intended to teach students basic skills that would enable them to complete the final project, which is building a networked pedometer. The pedometer would count steps and wirelessly share data with other devices.

“The idea was that we would work up to this final project. We wrote all the labs to incorporate things you would need to know to do the final project,” Howarth said.

The course also serves as an introduction to engineering entrepreneurship. Last semester, students were required to come up with a use and a marketing plan for the pedometer they built for their final project. While they were not required to program the device for a particular usage, some did so anyway.

Engineering freshman Atul Tiwary and his partner designed a device called SoundSync that would detect how fast you were moving and choose songs that matched your speed.

“This device calculates the ‘tempo’ that you are moving at … and then goes through your iTunes library to pick the song that is closest in tempo to [yours],” Tiwary said in an email.

The course will be offered again next semester under the name “Atoms, Bits, Circuits and Systems.” Tiwary recommends that next year’s batch of ESE freshmen take the course.

“The topics in this course are not very difficult to understand, but are very essential to learn properly, as these are the foundations of electrical engineering, after all,” he said. “Overall, this course is a low-pressure and enjoyable introduction to the simple but important fundamentals of electrical engineering.”

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