Board # 50 : A Hands-on First-year Electrical Engineering Introduction Course

In this paper, we present successful endeavors in establishing a new first-year introduction to Electrical Engineering (Intro to EE) course curriculum at Western Washington University. This course embraces a unique combination of seminarstyle guest lectures in conjunction with a series of hands-on laboratory exercises. This course was developed to achieve a number of goals: providing an overview of the EE profession, careers, and the field in general; introducing the pre-major students about the EE curricula and have an understanding of various course sequences in the EE program; exposing students with essential EE lab instruments and common software tools; and inspiring students to study the EE major. To achieve the aforementioned goals, we have designed this pilot course which consists of a 50-min lecture session and a two-hour hands-on laboratory session each week for a ten-week span. In each lecture, a guest speaker from local industry and/or professional societies gives a talk on subjects related to their EE profession. Each weekly laboratory session is composed of fun hands-on exercises which focus on a variety of aspects including software, circuitry, and microcontroller programming through real-life examples. In order to gauge the effectiveness of the Intro to EE course, we conducted student surveys from the group of students who took this class in winter 2016 and were admitted to the EE program in spring 2016. The students’ feedback from the survey results and their final exam performance demonstrated that this course has achieved the targeted goals and desired learning outcomes to a satisfactory level.