Experiment-centric Pedagogy in Circuits and Electronics Courses

Beginning in the late 1990s, the Electrical, Computer, and Systems Engineering (ECSE) Department at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute implemented hands-on studio-based pedagogy by building and equipping special purpose classrooms supporting lectures, experimentation, and computer simulation. While learning outcomes were excellent, very high costs and limited space access made it impossible to realize the full potential of the approach. Both of these barriers were removed by the development of the Mobile Studio which put highly capable personal instrumentation in the hands of students for application any time and any place enabling the implementation of Experiment Centric Pedagogy (ECP) throughout the Electrical and Computer Engineering programs and in a service course for other engineering disciplines. With the recent addition of a new first year ECSE course, a sequence covering all four undergraduate years now exists which includes courses in Circuits and Electronics and capstone design. This combination of multiple courses provides many opportunities to study the impact of ECP on transfer of learning from one course to another and several other research questions including whether or not personal instrumentation makes it easier for students to learn the fundamentals of measurement. Possibly the most powerful outcome of ECP is that learning experiences can be significantly more authentic. In the intro Circuits course, for example, students are offered the option of either doing traditional, step-by-step procedural labs or a new type of design-based lab, with both sequences addressing all course content. Finally, the general engineering electronics course provides a compressed version of the ECSE sequence which permits transfer to be addressed quickly for comparison purposes. In this paper, results from internal and external evaluation of student and instructor feedback via observation, interviews, survey and content assessment will be addressed.