Teaching of Design of Experiment to the First-Year Electrical Engineering Students

In the traditional Electrical Engineering curriculum, courses are introduced and taught progressively from the most fundamental subjects, such as circuit theory, for example, to more advanced subjects such as power electronics and electric drives. To complement the teaching of concepts, laboratory components are used to augment the courses in order to enhance students’ mastery of the subject matter and its applications. Usually, the capstone design course at the senior level allows students to synthesize what they learned and exercise their creative ability. The main goal is to facilitate an environment for students to walk through the entire design process from the formulation of ideas, through implementation, test and validation. There are many reasons that might contribute to the difficulty faced by the students in their ability to synthesize and be creative. Two specific contributing reasons that we identified and attempted to address are (1) insufficient critical thinking exercises and (2) lack of self-motivated activities unlike the cook-book style of laboratory exercises which, in general, is where students begin to learn the hands-on implementation of a design. In this paper, we report on how the re-structure of the laboratory activities in Circuit I, a secondsemester freshman-level course, help to introduce the concept and activities of “Design of Experiment”. Instead of the traditional follow-the-steps experiments that students perform to understand the various aspects of the Circuit I concepts covered in the lecture class, students are required to first understand the circuit, the intended results, and only then expected to design the experiment (DOE) needed to validate the intended results. At the end, students are required to produce documentation of the testing procedure so that the DOE can be repeated by other students. This reverse process of learning requires students to be more proactive in identifying (1) the factors to be tested, (2) the levels of those factors, (3) the structure and layout of experimental runs and operating conditions. Students are therefore made more aware of how to deal with measurement errors, unexplained variations, and how to properly use the equipment in the laboratory. These three points are precisely the essence of the DOE. The challenge comes when the process above is introduced in the course because the students are being exposed, for the first time, not just to circuit theory but also to the laboratory equipment and how to conduct experiments in the laboratory. Assessment of the results will be presented and discussed as well. The main goal of the first year laboratory activities is not to focus on electric circuit design, but rather to emphasize the critical thinking needed to design the experiment and prepare the relevant documentation. In addition to instilling critical thinking early on in the curriculum, it also allows us to measure more specifically the “design” aspect of the particular ABET Student Outcome “ability to design and conduct experiment, as well as to analyze and interpret data”.