Embedding Engineering Design in a Circuits and Instrumentation Course

The junior level circuits and instrumentation course at James Madison University is a 4-credit course with three lectures and one laboratory each week. Fundamentals of DC and AC circuit analysis are covered along with instrumentation topics. The laboratory portion of the course reinforces the concepts learned in lecture and assignments while building skills in circuit prototyping and measurement. Lab exercises have traditionally been a time when students follow a given procedure, collect data, and interpret the data. The highly structured experience often leads to students focusing on the procedure and not fully thinking through the concepts being covered. To encourage a deeper understanding of course concepts and how they translate to physical systems, two open-ended design projects were offered in place of structured labs in the most recent offering the circuits and instrumentation course. The design projects are undirected experiences that build on the directed experiences in the lecture and lab. Students are challenged to work in teams of four to design, build, test a specific type of circuit. Project one focused on a calibrated instrument that reported the weight of a sample using a strain gage. Project two focused on the design of an analog filtering circuit. No instruction is provided for the projects, rather, a set of design requirements, timetable, and supplemental materials (e.g., data sheets, vendor design briefs, past labs relevant to the design requirements) are given. Students were required to synthesize multiple weeks of course content into a single design project. This paper reports on our observations and findings for embedding design experiences into a circuits and instrumentation course, as well as descriptions of the design projects. Qualitative and quantitative assessment of student perceptions of learning achieved through the projects was performed using surveys and reflections.