Promoting Undergraduate Research in the Electrical Engineering Curriculum

Engaging undergraduate students in meaningful research experiences is considered a high impact educational practice. Benefits for the students include development of critical thinking skills, career preparation, improved retention within STEM disciplines, and increased interest in graduate school. This paper reports on our initial attempts to organize a course that promotes undergraduate research at the University of Texas at Tyler. The two main objectives are: (1) to develop the abilities of the students to do scientific research, and (2) to improve the technical communication skills of the students in the areas of reading, writing, and speaking. The projects include a field programmable gate array (FPGA) implementation of a video compression algorithm, acceleration of a sparse FFT algorithm involving general purpose graphical processing units (GPGPUs), computer modeling of a red fire ant colony, and low-power encryption circuits with differential power analysis (DPA) immunity. Four motivated students in their senior year were recruited to take part in this pilot course. The effectiveness of the research course is evaluated based upon the actual contributions of each assigned project, the dissemination of the results, and self-assessment of the students on a survey given at the conclusion of the course. This initial attempt at an undergraduate research elective is evaluated as a partial success based upon the goals and objectives laid out at the beginning of the course. All the students made substantial progress in their research but were not able to fully complete their projects. The primary reasons for this partial success were the optimistic goals set for the projects and the competing demands on the students’ time during their final semester as seniors. It is significant however that one conference paper resulted from this research and all four students were able to present posters describing their research at our institution’s annual Research Day. Based on the implementation of this research course, some guidelines for having a successful undergraduate research experience are given. Finally, some conclusions and future plans will be discussed.