Teaching The Non Science Major: E El0l The Most Popular Course At Yale

EE 101 The Digital Information Age, a course for non-science majors, is the largest course at Yale with an enrollment of more than 500 students. The goal of the course is to describe how common-place information systems work and why they work that way by illustrating clever engineering solutions to technical problems. The course considers the following topics: information sources, logic gates, computer hardware and software, measuring information using entropy, information coding and encryption, information transmission and information manipulation. EElOl includes a hardware and software project. For the hardware project each student implements a bean counter that counts a student-specific number of beans. The real success of the course is the software project that involves writing a personal World Wide Web page and developing a Web page for a Yale-affiliated organization. Having taken the course, students feel that they have an appreciation for the digital information artifacts they encounter on a daily basis. The joys and tribulations of teaching EElOl are discussed.