Integrating The Hobby Shop, A Non Conventional Freshmen Lab, Into The Electrical Engineering Curriculum

This paper presents interim results of a project aimed at increasing the enrollment and retention of engineering students through the development and integration of a broad-based hands-on, design and development lab, the Hobby Shop, into the introductory electrical engineering course at the University of Texas, Tyler. The introductory course in our electrical engineering (EE) program was redesigned based on the Hobby Shop as the core component. A library of projects, circuits, and systems was compiled and added to the course material and made accessible to the students enrolled in the course. Moreover, a set of practical hands-on workshops such as hands-on soldering workshops were developed and added to the course contents. Feedback from students who went through the first Hobby Shop based introductory EE course was collected and analyzed. Furthermore, the use of the Hobby Shop as a tool to boost recruitment effort is also discussed in the paper.