A Sophomore Level Ece Product Design Experience

Driven in part by ABET Engineering Criteria 2000, engineering educators are increasingly integrating design concepts and experiences into their curricula. The most common form of this integration is the senior capstone design experience, although many universities also introduce basic notions of engineering design in the first year. Traditional coursework alone may not adequately prepare students for rigorous senior design experiences, however, and the role of senior capstone design in the curriculum is more summative than formative, leaving little room for remediation and subsequent improvement. First-year design experiences can provide context, motivation, and excitement, but first-year students are typically without the technical background to experience a genuine electrical and computer engineering (ECE) design process that fills an unmet need and addresses all of the tradeoffs between technical and nontechnical matters that occur in product design.