Efficacy of Project-Based Instruction in a Hybridized Electronics and Controls Course

We present on outcome attainment from an electronics and control systems course modified to rely heavily upon a continuing project which incorporates a diverse set of educational components, including control system modeling, feedback compensation, microcontroller development, digital circuit design, digital communication, and analog circuit design. Although the majority of course outcomes saw improvement, the outcome relating to microcontroller development saw a marked reduction in outcome attainment. We present a detailed examination of this result as well as suggested remedies. Introduction: Engineering education has become increasingly reliant on courses that blend topics from different disciplines to prepare students for the modern engineering workforce. Sometimes this hybridization becomes formally categorized as is the case with Mechatronics. Other times courses are formed ad hoc to meet specific educational needs in a specific educational environment. Often these courses are designed to satisfy prerequisite requirements of capstone or advanced elective courses. This is a common issue identified in latter-sequence electrical engineering courses for non-EE majors, with a common solution being a collection of targeted projects with each touching on a handful of topics. A potential pitfall arises when courses with a specific but disparate collection of topics designed to meet the needs of subsequent courses are presented to students without proper framing. This can give the impression the content is encyclopedic in nature – part of a collection of knowledge without sequence that can be picked up or disregarded. This problem resembles concerns with project-based learning. The primary concern with project-based learning is that it runs the risk of neglecting topics that make up an essential sequence of knowledge and skill acquisition in engineering education. While project-based instruction runs the risk of leaving knowledge gaps across curriculum, it can serve as a tool to bridge topics and improve knowledge and skill acquisition within a course. We have adapted a course that combines control system modeling, feedback compensation, microcontroller development, digital circuit design, digital communication, and analog circuit design to include a unifying course project dependent upon these ordinarily distinct topics. Research Goals and Scope: The goal of this effort was to attempt to correct an identified weakness in a course offering and identify the degree to which a proposed structural change to the course corrects the weakness while maintaining student learning outcome attainment. Upon subsequent assessment, a specific weakness in outcome attainment was identified and we further expanded the scope of this research effort to better characterize the weakness and help formulate a proposed correction. Herein we describe the course offering prior to modification, the nature of the course project we developed, outcome attainment before and after the project addition, and a detailed assessment of one identified weakness resulting from the modification. Lastly, we propose modification which may help minimized the identified weakness.