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MIT Introductory EE Goes Hands-On
pioneer writes "MIT is looking to replace its introductory core EE (electrical engineering) curriculum with more hands-on classes. MIT Professors Abelson and Sussman discuss the new class, which replaces equations with actual circuit building, tours of electrical plants, and classes taught by famous professors."
=)
PS: sciocchi dell'alberino del pugno
MIT's insurance carrier just raised thier liability rates...
"If, therefore, any be unhappy, let him remember that he is unhappy by reason of himself alone."
~Epictetus
Why don't you just keep on rubbing in how cool the classes that I'll never get to take are?
EE stands for what?
"This is the third in a series of articles on educational initiatives that bring innovation into the classroom"
Exactly how is teaching by example and using real-life situations innovative by any stretch of the imagination? Good Professors at other schools have been doing this for years...
"MIT Professors Abelson and Sussman discuss the new class, which replaces equations with actual circuit building, tours of electrical plants, and classes taught by famous professors.""
So basically it's a IvyTech, or an ITT.
Well, this sounds great and all for the production of folks with "practical" knowledge, but I would worry that the theory is taking a back seat. I mean this kinda sounds like the high school electronics courses I took where we would build electronic circuit boards without really knowing the theory. There is a reason that the US higher ed system is commonly accepted as one of the best in the world and that is that many schools concentrate on theory allowing the students to innovate after they graduate. If we don't teach theory, we are simply producing maufacturing monkeys, not engineers.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
Lots of hands on exposure to role models is probably more valuable than the hands on exposure to circuits. Most of my friends that ended up at MIT HAD plenty of playing with circuits in their free time in high school and earlier.
-B
Of course, you'll be bitch slapped for it. But it was still funny.
True, too!
people in these classes have not bothered to do any work on there own.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
This is an excellent idea. As a recent student I can attest that most students don't understand anything of what goes on in their first circuts class. A hands on approach of building circuits would really help. (All of my second tier electrical engineering classes included a lab where we really saw how things worked).
I do security
... this had started while I was still an undergrad. Oh well, education changes slowly. I would've enjoyed 002 a lot more, though.
Two words :
WEIRD SCIENCE
Although I bet the hot chick gets replaced by a "fully functional", linux powered android.
Jack (the professor) said that one of his greatest fears as a new parent was that his child would stab a knife or scissors into an electrical socket. While the kid was an infant the situation was manageable, but eventually the kid was big enough to work around the little plastic plugs and other baby protectors.
So Jack rigged up a wall socket so that it was hooked to a battery instead of the house current. Then he gave the kid a knife and told him to stick the knife into the wall socket. The kid did as he was told and received the mildest of electric shocks. Thereafter the child had a healthy fear of electrical sockets.
Miko O'Sullivan
This sounds like a good idea to me. As a soon to be 3rd year EE major, I definately think this is the way to go. All of my memories from basic circuit design classes are well...nonexistant. The classes were so boring and theoretical that it was pointless to go to class...so i didn't. Learning circuits from a theoretical standpoint is difficult and often times the math is more complicated than what you'd reasonably expect from university class (I remember a 25 page homework solution for a 1 week assignment - 10 problems). There is also a lack of practical applications being taught. There is only so many times you can apply Kirchoff's voltage and current laws and Ohm's law to a box of lines and numbers and still be sane. Looking at schematics that mean nothing to you all day is pointless. I know I would have been far more interested in EE if we were building a transister radio or something useful rather than just tinkering with simple low/high/band pass filters and verifying Ohm's Law. Granted these are worthwhile skills, but you don't get the full picture of electrical engineering from crappy textbooks.
Scott
are also the authors of Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs. One of the very best books on CS ever written.
No, Thursday's out. How about never - is never good for you?
Someones' entrance application got rejected. Aww. MIT is a fairly decent University and goes beyond hype of the name. They do contribute to the science industries in several ways.
You can major in an image viewer at MIT?
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
WTF is the MIT admin thinking? There's already schools that specialize in that. MIT's supposed to be teaching the theorists.
I guess the old adage is right -- "all real science is physics, the rest is stamp collecting"
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
the new class, which replaces equations with actual circuit building
: "Class, now calculate the impedance of that condenser, connected to an AC generator, generating 110 volts with a frequency 60Hz (generator considered perfect, without internal resistance). Also, please note on the diagram that the condenser is polarized : can you explain why that circuit isn't correct ?"
: zzzZZZ *BANG* Hey shit what's that goddawful smell ?!
Math version of the class
Hand-on version of the class
Guess which class will remember that particular lesson best ? go MIT !
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
> which replaces equations with actual circuit
> building, tours of electrical plants, and classes
> taught by famous professors."
So MIT EEs no longer need to know Kirchoff's laws?
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
How does anyone of the caliber required for MIT even get this far without having done this before?
NetInfo connection failed for server 127.0.0.1/local
I don't think you understood the article. I watched this class take place and it was drastically different than anything else I've seen... of course other classes at MIT related things to real world situations and provide examples, but this class is also about getting an *intuitive* understanding of the material...
about the no-theory objection... theory comes much easier once you have a practical understanding of a system. it is much harder to learn theory (think, "why the hell do i need to know algebra" in grade school) if you have no idea *WHY* you need to know it!
Oh wait, they're not. Hands-on courses like this have been widely available at many public schools for over a decade.
But of course, MIT undergrad actually did something, so we HAVE to post it. Very unimpressive.
Berto
In other news, freshman biology students at Cal Tech will actually use microscopes this year, introductory computer science classes at Berkeley will involve computers, and students will be given chemicals to do their chemistry lab work this fall at Harvey Mudd. Furthermore, the English department at Yale is considering making it a requirement to read a book before earning the undergraduate degree.
Most Electrical Engineers don't do real world circuit work anyways. These jobs are left for Electrical technician. Most sit in front of computers doing some numerical computations for modelling anything that might be useful to military for going over some poor 3rd countries and bomb them.
Don't you know all our jobs are going to India and China? Why don't corporation outsource CEO jobs? - ignore this...just bitchin'...
Ok, most students graduate at the age of 24, and engineering is generally a five year study (not sure about MIT, but it is elsewhere).
1922 - 24 = 1898
2003 - 1898 = 105
This guy is old!
Just learning the theory without pracitical application is no good. Imagine you design a device (car radio) which you get working as a one-off mockup, but you forget to do sensitivity analysis on tolerances on a particular component.
Then figure the cost of having to replace that component in 10000 built car radios (desoldering one transistor and manually soldering a new one in), or scrapping the radios.
However, students that are just able to do the design and the math probably wouldn't be able to get it to work at all. In electronics its all about being able to do both !
One of the biggest problems I've seen with EE grads, is that some of them don't have any real-world experience. Sure, they can tell you the noise characteristics for a carbon resistor, but ask them to pick a 1/2 watt carbon resistor of a given value out of a bin, and they can't recognize it. A lack of hands-on experience, in my opinion, leads to them coming up with bad designs - either unworkably over-precise, or using non-standard parts, and so on.
While understanding theory is important, it's only half of the job; if one doesn't have a way to apply it, they're only half-educated.
I think the best engineers are those who have spent some time being technicians first.
Doesn't MIT have labs to go along with their EE classes? Granted that some labs are just as dry as their classroom counterparts, they can be a place to apply the theory learned (in a controlled manner).
Still, I agree that seeing applied engineering in the "Real World" (R) can help EE students greatly.
- From a recovering EE...
--== Radioactive cats have 18 half lives ==--
All theory and no practicality makes Jack a dull engineer.
Never bet against the affleck!
This being MIT, there's plenty of time for that later. I TA some classes at Caltech, and they're obscenely intense. If MIT's are anything similar, and I expect they are, then the kids won't be getting shorted on "theory."
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
Hal Abelson, the Class of 1922 Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering...
Abelson obviously ain't 99 years old, what does this title mean?
More lab time is a good idea. Touring factories, I'd expect, COULD be useful if the tour is targetted at 1st year EE students and isn't just some lame "look, we make stuff, isn't this cool" deal. Famous professors are probably worthless.
But back to the lab - absolutely essential. When I went to school at University of Illinois, and I believe this is still the case, all first year EE and CompE students have to take a freshman lab class. At the time the class project was to build a car (the digital logic and sensor portions thereof mostly) that could navigate a course consisting of white tape on a black surface.
In one semester, you started with simple logic gates and gradually built up something "useful" from those parts.
If you were the kind of person who was able to and wanted to do digital things for the rest of your life, you liked that class. If you were the kind of person who did not want to do digital things for the rest of your life, or were simply unable to pull it off, you hated that class and switched majors before investing thousands of dollars in a major you ended up hating.
For those who kept on with their EE/CompE, it was a great "frame" for the rest of the education - most things after that you could say "yeah, I can see how this is actually useful somewhere".
And it also prevents having lab-newbies show up in 300-level lab courses - a big drain on instructor and fellow group member resources alike.
If MIT hasn't been doing this until now, I'm only happier I didn't waste an extra $120,000 going to school there.
paintball
When I was younger, I had plenty of "hands-on" experience. I think I got my first Radio Shack "XXX-in-one" kit at about 7 or 8 years old, and started building circuits then - both those in the books, and those of my own.
In high school, I took 2.5 years of electronics, which was partly theory, mostly hands-on. So far, so good. But it wasn't until I took some incredibly dry, boring, theoretical classes filled with lots of equations using calculus that I really made a big jump in my understanding, and hence, my abilities.
Hands-on is great if you're going to be an electrician. If you're going to be an engineer, though, you really need to understand the underlying, fundamental principles - and you just can't understand them without a lot of dry, boring theory and equations.
steve
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
I took E.E. at Purdue in trhe late 60's and early 70's. The students were constantly asking for pratical applications for semester after semester of obscure math they were doing but getting little but promised o "that comes later"..... There was a story told of one Purdue EE grad who went to work and got a job designing military walkie-talkie radios. He designed a circuit that would work fine in theory, but fortunately someone else caught the problem before they started building them. He had done all the math fine, but one of the parts he calculated was needed for the walkie-talkie was a 1 farad 600 vold non-polar capacitor. Having no experience with actually building things, he stuck it in the circuit design and continued on. Back in the days this was done, such a capacitor would have weighed many times more than the soldier who was expected to carry the radio.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Oh good, we were being overrun by a bunch of no-names like Abelson and Sussman.... ;-)
-------------------------------------------
I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells.
-- Dr. Seuss
I believe the parent post is intentionally humorous, but just in case...Abelson's professorship has been funded by MIT's Class of 1922.
Well, hey, I didn't spend all those years playing Dungeons and Dragons and not learn a little something about courage.
Geeze, next they'll be dropping scheme in favor of VB!
Good to see some of the larger universities are finally clueing in on the old "hands on" idea.
Being someone who has tried both the University 'theory' approach and the community college 'hands-on' approach I can say that I've learned a lot more at my community college -- and tuition is dramatically lower.
One of my buddies at the college already has a degree in electrical engineering and worked for a few years before discovering he didn't learn anything at university.
He always tells me the joke "if you want to kill an electrical engineer just tell him the black wire is the ground" when refering to electrical outlets (here in north america). Kind of funny that a guy who spent four years to get a degree didn't learn something we covered in the first week of class.
I know they have it, there was tons of it in my old motherboard...
Um. Yeah. My non-famous professors sucked. Really, what does being famous have to do with the caliber of the class? If a professor is good, they are good, even if no-one has heard of them and they are fresh out of graduate school. The worst math professor at my college was the most highly acclaimed and published of the math faculty. The best math teacher I had was an instuctor, he taught Discrete Math and some others, wasn't allowed to teach 3000 level classes until he finished his PhD....
Just because I doubt myself does not mean I find your position compelling.
But your Purdue grad is a complete moron.
Even a high school student person with no hands-on experience knows that a 1 F capacitor is something extraordinary. To be able to graduate and make this mistake says a lot about this person's incompetence.
The 6.002 class is intended for sophomores but can be taken by an enterprising freshmen. In a follow-on class, 6.004, the final project was to build a trinary computer (10 years ago anyway). Back then, and probably still, even if you major in Computer Science you take the same four 6.00* core classes as the Electrical Engineers.
Well, hey, I didn't spend all those years playing Dungeons and Dragons and not learn a little something about courage.
When I took EE, I actually took optics as an elective since I was interested in photolithography (the process by which microchips are patterned). Unfortunately, the class consisted mostly of theoretical aspects of Maxwell's equations and electromagnetic field theory. The prof just touched on the lens equations and matrix approaches. At the end, I could tell you the boundary conditions at a air/reflector interface, but I couldn't tell you where the damn mirror actually focused the light. Not a terribly useful class if you actually want to understand and design complex lens systems.
I'm told that my old university (U of W) now uses only software simulations of logic gates and semiconductors, so students won't have to fuss with pesky wires and real components, or monkey gods forbid, solder a wire. It was some lame dyke of an administrator that decided this was somehow better.. at least in my day, we got to smoke the parts the old fashioned way ;)
I would agree, except for the fact that we're talking about intro level classes. The kind that someone who's not quite sure if they want to get into EE would take.
Tossing a bunch of formulae at students is most likely going to turn people off to electrical engineering. I would think that these classes are the place to get people excited about the field; the details can come later.
How many people got excited about history back in high school because of all the dates and places they memorized?
I graduated in 1985 and at the time, I was appalled at the number of my fellow students had never picked up a soldering iron before (although one woman had when she did some stained glass). I can't count the number of graduates I have seen over the past 18 years that didn't know how to create a simple test circuit to save their lives. This is analogous to a doctor graduating without ever touching a patience while at school - would you want to be looked after by somebody that just used text books and computer simulations?
From the student perspective, I've never understood how somebody could enroll in something like Electrical Engineering without actually having built a circuit before. To any prospective students: This is for the rest of your life - why don't you see if you are actually interested in it?
Sorry, but I'm tired of explaining how an oscilloscope works to recent grads with a GP of 4.0.
myke
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
Being a very smart boy he immediately showed his little brother the trick.
Help fight continental drift.
Electronics education is a joke. Take the transistor. You can pretty well specify what it does with a handful of equations. But that's not how it's described in the books. No, they describe a multiplicity of different ways of doing things and write text which is basically a fairy story to describe how and what it does. If EE students where just taught some mathematics first then much of the rest of the course would be a breeze. Additionally the students would also be numerate - something of an advantage in the electronics world you'd think. Anyway, if you're serious as an electronic engineer then you had lots of hands on experience in your parents' garage before you discovered girls.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
Also you should read their book on Scheme
Our curriculum was very "hands on," which allowed us to actually apply the theoretical classroom knowledge in the lab (and yes, we learned the theory). Higher level courses consist more of project milestones than tests, which mimic the typical development cycle of a new product being constructed and prepped for market (including the boring tech writing stuff).
Our professors must have several years of industry experience before teaching, class sizes remain small, and best of all the professor actually teaches the course and the lab section. The only thing keeping our program from issuing EE degrees instead of EET degrees is a much larger state university down the road that has a football and basketball team (read: has much more political influence in the state).
As this article clearly demonstrates, big schools get most of the attention with a headline like this. Small schools with no sports program trudge along, pumping out very knowledgeable grads, who get funny looks when they mention their school name in a job interview.
Sad, indeed.
***
Radio Shack. You've got questions...we've got blank stares(TM).
Hahaha... what a weenie. Darn, he caught them red-handed...MIT has a special majors just for people trying to "reinforce class divisions in society" or "terrorize and kill people around the world."
Just curious, but did you say what you said in this post in your admissions essay? Perhaps that might explain it.
Here at New Mexico State University, the first circuits class including a mandatory laboratory has been taught in the freshman year (calculus I is the co-requisite) for five years. This really does wonders in keeping the student's interest level up. The students must also do a group project with a final report and presentation at the end of the semester.
Bad boys rape our young girls but Violet gives willingly.
Bad beer rips our young guts but vodka goes well.
The "hands on" class about resistors should be interesting.
Gee, its not like MIT physics didn't have an experimental version (8.01x, 8.02x) of its classes ten years ago.
get with the program. its just like course 6 to be deriving all their cool stuff from physics anyway, when they are not stealing course ideas from mechanical engineering, that is.
And 6.001 is a just a dumb witgenstein reference to recursion anyway...
Your sig:
Cutie Pi 3.1415926535897932384626433832795028841972....
If you are going to show Pi with "..." to indicate that it keeps going, the last digit should be a one, not a two. The two you are showing is because the version you have is rounded at the 40th decimal place. The actual 40th place is a one and the 41st is a six (...41971693993...).
Want to know something really scary? I did that from memory.
Only a -very small- part of the US higher education system is considered that highly. Namely, only schools like MIT, Harvard, Princeton, etc. (not in any order or those schools specifically). The majority of the "college system" in the US is not -that- great compared to Europe for example. But a few institutes really stand out though. Compared to Europe the system shows more diversity in the quality. In general, these top-level schools are considered so highly because they guide their students to a high level of abstract thinking, needed to solve the "big" scientific problems. (and, well, I guess make lots of money in some businesses, but that's another story...). Therefore this development is good in a limited way, but must NEVER lower the standards of abstract thinking of students.
"...but each student's circuit had different coefficients, requiring individual work. These tutorials provide immediate feedback so students donï½t have to wait to find out if they applied the principles correctly."
that's true for many courses where i did my undergrad (mcgill). people still copy everything they can off others (especially girls because they would never need to do anything with all the desperate guys trying to 'help' them... but that's another story)... so if they cant copy the values, they still take lab reports and copy-paste the explanation/methodology parts because those are pretty much the same.
however i do think this is a good idea, since it looks like the teacher-student ratio is a lot more balanced in courses like this, and having industry people coming in to help out in the course makes the students feel better about themselves when they get something working... but again, it's MIT... it's expensive and you get what you paid for in your tuition... well better than bloody canadian schools anyway.
here, it's required for CE students to take discrete math, but the faculty does not offer any course in logic synthesis, formal verification, or any other course that follows up and needs the application of that. so after we spent an entire semester learning it, it goes away twice as fast. hands on courses are good because they dont go away that fast.
intro/progrmaming courses still need to stay..
it's embarrassing that some people graduating in EE/CE still cant even write a simple C program (, and yet those are the people that have better GPAs than I)..
welll, in the end, what the heck.. no fresh grads have jobs anyways...! postgrad is our refugee.
my blog
As a recent (less than 1 month ago) EE grad from a top school, I have to say that I think this desperately needed.
Right now it is possible to get a degree in EE without ever having picked up a soldering iron. Theory is important, but we're not talking about some shitty school here. Of course MIT is going to teach their students the theory.
Let me give you some examples here:
IMHO, to be a real engineer, you need to understand both the theory, AND how to use it.
There is a huge gap between paper and reality. There are all kinds of important details that need to be worked out when you're actually building something. Grads should have experience working out those details. Without it, they can be well suited to be researchers and academics, but not designers of things that someone is going to produce 100,000 of.
There is a reason that the US higher ed system is commonly accepted as one of the best in the world and that is that many schools concentrate on theory allowing the students to innovate after they graduate.
If they don't know how to apply this theory, all they're going to be able to do is create innovative new theory. A well-educated engineer should have an ample knowledge of the theory, AND how to use it is real-world applications.
Life is too short to proofread.
I got my EE degree from Boise State University, hardly the technological powerhouse of MIT's caliber, but one thing that concerned the faculty in the College of Engineering was the need to not just attract students who wanted to major in engineering, but also to retain them once they started the program.
It doesn't take a rocket scientist (or an engineer) to realize that two years of core engineering classes full of theory, math and seemingly non-applicable ideas is pretty damn boring to an awful lot of people. Although you may disagree, I think that it is not just important, but critical to see some sort of practical engineering examples. Sure, I got a lab with my physics class (I made a telescope, charted magnetic flux lines and measured acceleration, etc.) and there was a chemistry lab (oh boy, we made Slime). There was even a rudimentary circuits lab that taught us something about discrete passive devices. But the one class that was the "hook" that worked to cause most of the borderline (as in not sure if they want to continue in engineering) students to keep on was the Introduction to Engineering course.
This was a course that featured a topic from a different engineering discipline each week: Electrical, Civil and Mechanical. The one hour lecture by a different professor from the field each week was followed by two three hour labs of projects related to that topic.
Sure, we were just taking Calculus I at the time and no, we didn't know Kirchoff's laws. We couldn't describe a system with differential equations, but there are a ton of things that a student can do that involve intuitive engineering knowledge that don't require any more science than simply understanding how something works - not why it works...that comes later.
At the end of the semester, the "capstone" project was, as I recall, a car that had to navigate away from obstacles using IR sensors. Yes, a lot of stuff was prepackaged, but the experience was valuable in that it showed the application of ideas and served as a way to tide us over those first couple of years when hours of math, physics and chemistry threatened to send us all screaming down the halls.
I should point out that, at least at Boise State, the College of Engineering has a very high graduation rate. I don't recall any EE student who started their freshman year with me who didn't go all the way to the end and graduate. Obviously there is a lot that goes into a high graduation rate, including the dedication and determination of the student as well as the quality and committment of the professors, but it seems to me that something works at BSU.
Also, every one of those graduates who took the Fundamentals exam (a prerequisite for becoming a Professional Engineer) passed. Did EE120 make the difference? I can't say, but I do know that it was one of the courses that I took that really sticks in my mind because it showed early on that the things that we were learning and were going to learn had practical applications.
-h-
after taking every electronics class offered at community college (100+ credits), i transferred to state to persue my EE. i guess it was mostly my shock and utter disappointment to find out that a vast majority of the classes were all theory. i must have been spoiled in community college by the small classes, cheaper tuition and better teacher/student interaction during lab time. watching new students trying to install a diode as a capacitor can be funny the first couple times, but the serious lack of lab time really makes one think that colleges are more of a cookie-cutter puppy mill rather than a positive learning institution for the future generation.
The article implies that earlier generations of MIT students included lots of electronics hobbyists, whereas today that portion has been replaced with programmers and sysadmins. It makes sense for universities to arrange the curriculum to work with these backgrounds and try to fill in the gaps, without re-treading subjects most freshmen already know. Whereas before it made most sense to offer extensive programming courses (the electronics knowledge being assumed), now MIT makes the smart move of concentrating on hands-on electronics (programming knowledge being assumed). I bet this will result in more well-rounded graduates!
I remember a speech by Alan Cox some years ago where he noted this trend - computer science schools had better get ready, he said, to adapt to incoming freshmen classes where most students already have extensive user-level, if not kernel-level, programming experience.
I remember that my tecnology teacher (kind of a very basic introduction to electronics and general tech stuff) was telling us that they had a lot of fun at school. Turns out one of their favourite jokes was finding a capacitor that could stand 200 volts or so, charging it, and leaving it on the table. Evenutally somebody always picked it up and got a good shock.
i go to mit, and i will be taking 6.002 next term, and i am really glad that they didn't change the class totally but offered it as a choice. they are changing a bunch of classes to make them more "hands on" but its just b.s. garbage. hands on sucks, i would much rather learn things more theoretically. when you learn with the hands on approach, they tell you "this is true, believe it" but they don't tell you why its true. the person with the theoretical background has a deeper understanding of the material, and why it works, not just how to fart around to make it work without understanding the deeper theory behind why it works. i came to mit to get away from all of this crap that i saw in high school, and i find myself running into it more and more. this crap really sucks.
When I took intro EE at Berkeley last year, the mathematical lecture portion was coupled with the hands-on lab part. We actually got to build rudimentary robots (CalBots) at the end. The experience was a good one, and I think other universities should adopt this sort of merger between the practical and the esoteric.
Hands on approach, eh? This has been around for years at Purdue in the Technology department. Having been in the program for 2 years now, I would recommend it for anyone that wants a hands on approach in addition to the math side. We use Laplace transforms, Forier, diff. eq., and systems just like everyone else. But for most of the classes we also spend 3 hours a week in lab (per class) building what we learned (for example, a class H and class D amplifies, AM transmitter, H-bridge motor controllers, programing micro-controllers, etc.) I know people in EE that wouldn't know where to begin in practical circuit design. But thats because they havn't (and most likely won't) be taught it. And that is exactly the problem with most engineering programs these days.
"I've figured out what's wrong with life: It's other people." -Dilbert
Any EE student who arrives at the Toot without having worn-out one of these or something similar is already a couple of years behind his peers.
Of course, if Radio Shyster can't keep the farking things in stock, what hope is there for humanity?
It amazes me that the school system is still producing students (read: half of the people who have posted on this subject) that honestly feel that a university (etc.) must spoon feed their students everything they need to know on a subject. Here's some real world training: spend some of your own time "applying" what you learned. Build the circuit yourself, smarty! I'm not saying that classes should be all theory - perhaps MIT has the balance wrong. But expecting to be taught everything you need to know, with no work outside your coursework, well, let's just say you won't be working with me any time soon...
Thank goodness.
6.002 was one of my least favorite classes (I ultimately went 6.3, the comp-sci variant of the CS/EE degree at MIT) because, well, it's so disconnected from reality. I've found almost zero utility out of it. The other "core" 6-double-oh classes (6.003 = signals, 6.004 = build a simple computer) are vastly, vastly, more useful.
An overdue change, if you ask me.
-- Rob "Xemu" Fermier
This shouldn't be news, this is how things should be. The reason I dropped out of college was because I coudn't learn anything in it because all they threw at me were equations and useless information and expect me to spit it back out on a test. The real world works much differently. As Morpheus says: Some rules can be bent; others can be broken.
Case in point: How much time do the consultant admins among you spend cleaning up after MCSE's? Most MCSE's are prime examples of what happens when you unleash a strictly book-educated student into the real world. Just as stupidly, most companies think the piece of paper instantly qualifies them to work on the systems. Funny how it works that way with diplomas, too.
-R
So why didn't you go to the school down the street?
Was it A) You didn't make the entrance requirements or B) You wern't willing to invest the additional dollars in an education from a school with better job-getting clout? (Assuming the other school even cost more?) or C) You never thought to investigate any of this before picking a college?
The only person at fault for the degrees granted by and job opportunities available from the school you're going to is *YOU*, as it's *YOU* who chose the school.
paintball
We had to identify a mystery cobalt compound and write up a 30 page document explaining how we knew we were right (or in some people's cases, why they still didn't know).
I should have gone to Boise State!
paintball
Disclaimer: I have tremendous respect for Hal Abelson and Gerry Sussman, having worked with both while teaching the MIT EECS core undergraduate curriculum, including 6.002.
The article glosses over a couple of details which are important to understanding what Abelson and Sussman are proposing (as evidenced by many of the comments thus far). The course, 6.002, is already a laboratory couse with required lab assignments. However, there aren't that many (4 or 5), and while one's lab grades are important, it is possible to pass the course (*pass*, not do well) without doing well on the labs. The course is reasonably heavy on theory, and somewhat light on practical knowledge. When I was TA-ing it, I was amazed at how many students did not already know how to solder.
For many students, it was the first lab course ever, so things like oscilloscopes were poorly-understood tools. (As part of the first lab assignment, if I recall, one must prove proficiency with a 'scope.) As a result of this, many of the students don't really get a good understanding of basic parameters and values -- practical knowledge -- because there's so much to learn already, and because there are only 4 or 5 lab assignments and only so many lab TAs.
What Abelson and Sussman are trying to do (and, by the way, they are the authors of what is widely considered one of the best, if not the best, course at MIT, 6.001) is shift some of the tutorial instruction, typically centered on going over lectures and recitations in more detail with an eye towards the homework assignments and similar problems, towards understanding specific real-world problems. They are, in effect, changing the syllabus where it has been previously poorly-defined, and where the student-to-faculty ratio is the lowest, so it can do the most good.
(For those not familiar with the way such courses are structured, there are some number of hundreds of students per term taking the course, and three levels of instruction: twice- or thrice-weekly lectures by senior faculty to the entire class, supplemented by twice-weekly recitations by junior faculty or senior graduate students to sections of 15-30 students, supplemented by once-weekly tutorials by junior graduate students to sections of 4-8 students. This is a well-developed and powerful means of teaching a huge amount of difficult material in a short amount of time to highly-motivated students.)
It will be very interesting to see how 6.002x develops. Very interesting. Might just go and volunteer to help teach next term right now.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
That's what H1B visas are for.
paintball
theory comes much easier once you have a practical understanding of a system.
Not always. I went through a technician program before starting my EE (on the theory that maybe I could get a decent paying job to help me pay for school, but that's another post), and I don't think it helped me with the theory much at all. All the tech classes I took were very hands on, and I have a pretty good handle on building and even designing circuits, at least simple ones.
When I took the circuits portion of the physics series, though, I was just as lost as anyone else. I could look at the circuit and know what it was doing, but there didn't seem to be any connection at all between that and the theory the lab was supposed to be based on. Even the basics like Ohm's law had become unweildly nonsense.
On the other hand, I have friends who made it through that and later were exposed to electronics as it is tought to technicians, and I could actually see everything falling into place in their minds.
That said, I think the demise of the apprenticeship is one of the worst things to happen to education, and I'm glad that an institution like MIT is smart enough to recognize that and try to fill in the gap to some degree.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
If I were more interested in moving into management, I probably would have chosen the other school.
Your response implies that I am not intelligent, which is exactly the point of my original post. Would it have been different if I had inserted the name of your favorite football team for my college?
The only person at fault for the degrees granted by and job opportunities available from the school you're going to is *YOU*, as it's *YOU* who chose the school.
The *people* at fault for the degrees granted by the school I attended are the politicians in charge of our state's educational system. I only wish I had a say in these matters.
***
Radio Shack. You've got questions...we've got blank stares(TM).
I had Professor Sussman when I was in school. Great guy, one of my top favorite professors of all time. Awesome to see that he is back at MIT and making waves.
Anyone read any of his books on media and communications?
-Eod
Additional hands on is nice, but what's really needed is for the students to want to learn. What kept me studying EE was applying it to what I really liked to do at the time: make music & wierd ass sounds.
While we were deep in the theory of opamps and such, I was pulling old ElectroHarmonix schematics off the web and attempting to breadboard some of them. Skip ahead to signal analysis, what's the deal with this transfer function stuff? Take some analog synth components and look at the filters, typically you'll find a four pole low pass. Ok, so that's what a transfer function is...
It really helps if you can identify with what you're studying, and if you can identify with it outside of your academic environment then you're really going to excel.
That you're griping about something that is the result of your choice. You said yourself that you wanted a certain type of education - if that's how you chose the school you're at, don't be griping that it's not the school you didn't choose.
If you wanted a school that offered something your current school does not, then maybe you should have chosen somewhere else.
You're not at fault for the degrees offerred at SPSU, but you are responsible for the degrees offered at the school you chose to attend. What school has what sports team has nothing to do with it.
paintball
If you're ahead of your time, you get no services.
I got into electrical engineering at Northwestern's Tech Institute in the 1970s despite the fact that I came from a family with no practical skills and a snooty school with no shop program. I was explicitly looking for some remedial education. This was part of the appeal of engineering for me.
I was very strong mathematically and conceptually but didn't know how to pronounce "solder", had no idea why anyone would care about some marginal phenomena called "semiconductors" and thought a "transistor" was a type of radio. I left knowing better, but only slightly. Certainly no one at Northwestern bothered to teach me to drill or mount or solder things.
Ironically, while I wasn't remotely ready for an entry level tech job, I was well prepared for grad school. So I continued my education, and eventually met some patient people who showed me how to wire wrap and continuity test and such, but at the time I got my bachelor's degree I was furious. I had an engineering degree, but expected and deserved the derision of anyone who had ever built a machine that worked.
It was ASSUMED that an engineering student came from an engineering or at least a technical family or had a strong interest in such things in high school. I went through the entire program not knowing things that were presumed to be general knowledge in the student population, though they were in no way explicit prerequisites, and though no remediation was offerred.
From where I'm sitting, this brilliant MIT insight is thirty years too late.
mt
...Cal Poly has been doing this for years, even decades now. Our motto is even "Learning by Doing."
...that emphasizes a "learn by doing" educational experience...
I worked with an MIT graduate with a masters degree in EE who was working on her PhD at the University of Washington and she had never used a soldering iron. Not once in six years at MIT had she picked up a soldering iron and soldered two things together. Her attitude was that you had technicians to do that for you, which I found to be roughly equivalent to a doctor saying "No, I don't know how to draw blood, I have nurses to do that for me."
Now if only the U of Washington would adopt a similar curriculum I'd go back to school and finish my EE degree.
cheap labor conservatives - they want to keep you hungry enough to be thankful for minimum wage.
A few comments. I'm a rising sophomore at MIT, and a first-time poster. I'm currently debating whether or not to hold off 6.002 a semester to take 6.002x for next fall's scheduling, so I figured I'd join in the discussion. First of all, to those who are crying that MIT must have sucked for not having labs before this, the article was pretty skewed in that regard. Regular 6.002 has four mandatory, pretty thorough labs (if you skip even one of them, failure is assured) that explain the more basic aspects of EE. They're similar to the four required programming projects in MIT's intro CS class, 6.001. 6.002x isn't novel in that it uses labs - it's novel in that it focuses on applied EE, and occasionally gives Kirchoff a break to make kids inspired in their first course in a field they've probably waited their whole life to explore formally. Secondly, I think this change is definitely for the better. A lot of students currently complain that 6.002 is way too boring and sucks the fun out of EE - it's important that an intro course occasionally steps back and looks at the big picture, showing how what they're learning really applies on the job. (The corresponding intro CS course, 6.001, does a fairly good job of that in discussing the fundamental nature of algorithms, particularly evaluators, in developing all programs throughout the course). Lastly, this is a long line in a trend at MIT to offer different types of classes for different types of learning. One thing the article fails to mention is that this takes kids out of the 400+ person 6.002 lecture hall and puts them in a more intimate environment - that alone will make the labs more meaningful. MIT has tried similar projects with 8.01/2x, ESG and Concourse, all with great success - it's no surprise that MIT's largest department would get in on the act as well. Personally, I feel the change is long overdue.
... shocking.
I graduated with a CS degree from USC, and thought it was normal to be required to take so many EE classes, until I found out it was just us :) And our EE classes were hands on, and such. Come to think of it, so were our CS classes. We've had architects from local firms come by to teach electives or guest lecture and such.
:)
I remember I was shocked, when I talked to friends from UCLA that were never required to take anything other than a 101 EE class, and even more shocked that their "theory" classes did not involve any hands-on activities or coding, like ours did. I remember making fun of a few friends whose upper-div classes they were taking their senior year, were classes I took as a freshmen. Though, I do have friends from UC-Berkeley, that had similar curriculum, but that didn't surprise since a lot of our material came from berkeley
Anyways, this has always shown itself come interview time, as we have noticed that college grads from different schools exhibit much different and yet consistent levels of understanding.
After Navy I-level Avionics school (8 years USMC) and 2 semesters of Electroncs at Palomar(2 year jr college in SOCAL) and my current job as a repair tech for a biomedical company. I've built 1000 of circuits, troubleshot millions of failed Circuit boards. And I am constantly worried about my lack of a formal education when interviewing for jobs but after reading this maybe I shouldn't be....
Some of the guys that were interviewing me were shocked, that we designed a 32 bit 5 stage pipelined processor, then simulate and test it. Some of the other parts we actually built and used a spectrum analyser. And I was a CS student! (the part that shocked them)
:)
But I know what you're talking about. There is no way in hell I would've figured out all those timing glitches without the simulation testing. And if I didn't know how to interpret the waveform outputs, I'd have been screwed. And as a side benafit, I have no qualms with going into my Playstation, take it apart, and soldering in a mod chip
Skinner never raised a daughter in a box.
http://www.snopes.com/science/skinner.htm
I stuck two metal chop sticks into the AC outlet. And I used the chopsticks to touch the appropriate portions of my dad's flashbulb. (he was a camera hobbiest) I really scared the crap out of my parents!
:)
:)
Don't think I learned my lesson, cause I stuck a penny into a lighbulb socket
Though I was never manly enough to try the same tricks to the 220v outlet in the garage
He claimed he can tell the difference between 110 and 220, by "touch"...
One of the projects, involved building a house in a nearby neighborhood. I don't remember how, (was a long time ago), but he tried proving it one time.
By the way, if you are ever in Portland, I'll point out which house it was, so you'll be sure to NEVER buy it! I remember looking at the joists while we were building it, and seeing mathematical calculations that poeple did, that were WRONG!
You should try taking an upper division math class, that is taught by a mathematician. Oh my fscking god, that was rediculous. If it wasn't bad enough that the assignments were frieking impossible, the prof constantly told jokes that nobody understood...
You should try taking classes that are tought by senile old people that are about to retire. I had the misfortune for one of those. We had two chalk board in this particular class, that were perpendicular to each other. The prof was so senile, multiple times throughout the semester he'd write our assignment on one board, then about 20 minutes later, he'd write it again on the other, and proceed to repeat his lecture for the NEXT 20 minutes.
:)
There were times, when he'd give the same test multiple times. So me, being dumb, I thought I register for the next class in the sequence, which he was assigned as the professor, thinking it would be easy. Lo and behold, he retired and I got a fresh full of energy professor. However, I actually liked that professor, and I actually learned all the stuff I shouldve learned from the previous class, so it worked out
When I took chemistry in high school, the teacher kept getting pissed at how much I used the bunson burners. But at least I didn't catch the wall on fire. One of the guys in our class connected the tubes wrong, and his test-tube exploded, and the poster on the wall caught on fire. I'll never forget that particular day, it was the only time people actually yelled, "HIT THE DECK!", during class, and it was actually followed by an explosion, (albeit small)...
But anyways, damn... Twice? In my AP Bio class, we always used those things. We even had times when they carted in Spectral analysers and such. Was your bio class hands on? Cause I'd say mine was half half, between textbook and labs.
I know a bunch of literature majors, that only majored in literature, because they got rejected from the med school, and they wanted to keep their grades up, so they could reapply later :)
Stick it in Taco's ass.
I was an EE major (for three years) in college before switching to CS. The only circuit building experience I got was at my job, and my at home hobbies.
Can you imagine a CS major never implementing a quicksort? Sure, it's nice to know that an n log n sort is faster than an n squared sort, but what good is that knowledge if you can't code it?
-ted
Don't be so sure you'll never get to take that course. MIT - the birthplace of GNU, after all - is leading the academic world in its "OpenCourseWare" initiative. The syllabi, lecture notes, assignments, labs and exams for some courses have already been published on the web, and MIT plans to publish almost all its course materials by 2007.
That said, few people breadboard electronics much any more. It's SPICE, logic simulators, FPGAs, ASICs, and surface-mount devices. It's getting hard to find parts in DIP packaging.
I'm currently running a project that involves complex control systems, and the people working on the electronics and control software mostly have ME degrees, not EE or CS.
If you want hands on, real world practical applications, try Engineering Technology instead of Engineering. Want to build circuits and learn the theory? This sounds like Engineering Technology, although I'd have assumed EE students built actual circuits in "lab" and such.
I mean, they're the only EEs with REAL ULTIMATE POWER!
"about the no-theory objection... theory comes much easier once you have a practical understanding of a system. it is much harder to learn theory (think, "why the hell do i need to know algebra" in grade school) if you have no idea *WHY* you need to know it!"
One would hope that when you are in college, you realize why you are being taught things, instead of mindlessly studying for tests.
I'm an EE who writes embedded software. I frequently go on recruiting trips for my employer and find it very rare to find EEs with practical experience working with embedded hardware/software. It's always Java this, C++ that. They've never actually written boot code for a processor of any sort. They've never configured chip selects or analyzed timing. They have never used a JTAG emulator with a prototype board. The EEs/ComEs I do hire are very good, but it takes time to train them to work in a lab environment and explain how to use the equipment as well as to relate software to the low level hardware. Do any Universities offer emphasis in embedded product development?
This sounds like a good idea because so many people are bad at building what they design but it is really nothing to new. I went to a local vo tech school in highschool for my first year of electrical engineering and then went to DeVry. Both were pretty hands on.
My hands are clumsy though. I don't like actually trying to build things myself because I end up with with a lot of mistakes and burnt fingers and stuff. I'm just not good at working with small parts. I'd rather design and supervise others building my design. I've actually found that women are a lot better at building circuits than most guys. I'd guess because they have smaller hands and are a little bit more graceful.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Mechanical engineering - 6 mornings a week at lectures, 4 afternoons a week in the labs. One of our first electrical labs was building a multimeter from a kit - no big deal, and then adjusting it so that it calibrated rather well, on every range. We had to work out all the component values by hand.
At the university I attend, all of the engineering programs require 24 months (6 terms * 4 months) of co-operative work to get a degree. Since this system has been in place for a long time, we actually get good employers looking for students, as well. We also have a large practical component to our labs, but I think getting out and actually working adds to this even more.
:)
On another note, why do "famous professors" matter so much? Honestly, I don't care how known my professor is so long as they know what they're doing and are good at teaching. I'd much rather have my school pay half as much on professors and put that money to equipment and other program improvements. Unless of course the famous professors work for cheap because they love doing it so much
Now, now, there's always MIT grad school.
MIT reinforces class divisions about as much as Jesse Jackson frolicks around in pillow cases in front of burning crosses. Just read MIT's "friend of the court" briefs supporting the current affirmative action case before the Supreme Court.
The "show me the money" and Nazi-allusion arguments are poor arguments too. Beliefs and arguments like these are what lead to Nazi death camps.
I am a senior at Caltech. In my Freshman biology class (admittedly for non-majors), we had no labs, 7 problem sets. Of those sets, over consisted of either: .pdb molecule viewer.
1. Writing Maple programs to solve differential equations.
2. Looking up phrases in biological databases and telling how many results were obtained
3. Learning how to use the swiss
I recently graduated from a (non-MIT) EE curriculum. You mean it's possible to get a degree without actually having to *build* anything?
:-)
There is nothing that instills respect for the apparatus (and frustration, rage, etc.), not to mention the concept of component drift, quite like an entire lab team frantically retuning their 6th-order Chebyshev filter 15 minutes before it's due, after everyone's individual breadboard, containing a piece of the circuit, gets a little rained on between the dorms and the lab.
(True story - may I never relive it
Caveat Emptor is not a business model.
I think the major problem affecting EE courses is that they want us to know every damn thing out there following Ohms law.
I am stuck with this High Voltage Tx lab which I am required to take, all hands-on but highly irrelavant for that Signal Processing Masters program I intend to join.
But Analogue's fun for sure
From the post-WW2 era:
Black Boys Rape Our Young Girls Behind Victory Garden Walls
So technically you have hands-on expereience. I took the dicital lab. You didnt solder, but did wire-wrap ICs together.
When I was TA-ing it, I was amazed at how many students did not already know how to solder.
You know, all the 6-3's were required to take it, too, and I don't know why you would assume that a computer science major would necessarily know how to solder.
I hope the class works out well - would have been fun. Well, at least I think it would have been. I remember the 6.003 labs being painful, because the plants were so poorly modeled. I knew I had done everything right theoretically, but since they didn't teach how to model the thing itself (that was more of a course 2 thing), it didn't work right for a while, I couldn't do anything but trial and error, and it was more frustrating than anything else. Which is like the real world, I guess, but not really useful.
I just graduated from the University of Delaware with a math degree. I really would have loved to learn more about electronics but the only time I got to touch any of it was in a Physics 2 lab. Alot of the engineers complain about Calc not being relavant because the math people who teach it don't know how to make it relavant.
Luckily the department at Delaware is bringing in alot of "hands on" mathematicians and in fact just built a lab for E&M and fluids in the math department. While math people will still never do engineering, It is interesting to see a mathematician laugh about the fact that their solution to the Navier-Stokes equations actually works in the lab. They almost seem suprised.
So I guess thet point is, maybe getting applied math professors into labs is the way to make their curriculum more relavant.
When I went to college, I enrolled in CompE over Chemistry, but wasn't sure which I really wanted to do. After doing the cobalt lab, I was positive I definitely did not want to do chemistry. If all I had done was make slime (which I'd done in junior high, and high school) I wouldn't have found out that real chemistry sucks.
Not that I was bad at it - I had some of the best results in the few hundred person class, and no one could titrate a solution better than I could. But I hated it - weeks of essentially boiling off water, meticulously drying and measuring compounds.. definitely not for me.
Point of the matter is that because I found out early that I hated real chemistry, I didn't make the mistake of changing majors. And even ifI couldn't isolate a compound to save my life now, I do have an appreciation as to how it's done, which actually is somewhat handy to me, if even in only a "recreational" (i.e. I can do a better job of interpreting a lot of news) sense.
paintball
because you can't spell pursue
HA#!
Correct me if I am mistaken, of course, but there was always a lab component of this course - at least back in 1985. What is being replaced is the recitations with even more hands on stuff.
The article makes it sound like 6.002 was always pure theory, which IMHO, was never the case.
You were a moderator with 5 points. You should have read the moderator guidelines before you did any moderating
this really surprises me..
I'm an engineer at the University of New Brunswick we have labs for almost every class we have and they are 3-5 hours a week hands on labs..
I understand not having hands on in many degrees even computer science however a degree like electrical engineering or mine Forestry Engineering it is key to know what you are doing before you get out there. I can know all the theory in the world about sexing plants but until you actually do it you really know nothing.
MIT is known as the brain school but I think you are going to see in a few years from now people not wanting there grads because they only seam to know theory. I was in a theory degree once the school I was going too was 100% theory and it was a computer science degree.. I at the time worked at a helpdesk for the school and I had a grad student come up and ask me what does ftp'ing a file mean.. A grad computer science student doesn't know what ftp is...
My point is hands on is the way to go you learn much much more about what your job really is going to be and really prepairs you for what you are going to be doing in the real world... After all we can all look up formulias in a book but not all us can weld for the first time.
Of course, when a big name school decides to change something, the whole world sits up and takes notice. But this is not a new idea. Most schools have hands on practice in lab courses, as well as projects in the last two years of undergrad. If you're looking for something truly unique, try taking at look at Oregon State University and the TekBots program. The TekBots program starts during the first year for Electrical and Computer Engineering students, with the construction of a simple robot. This robot is used to relate theories from lecture to real world problems, such as what happens to a motors speed and torque as the voltage and current are changed. Now here's what makes the program unique. Instead of the students seeing the robot for just one course, the robot follows them throughout their years at OSU, so by senior year, the TekBot is very advanced. This allows the professors at OSU to teach topics such as Digital Logic, Signals and Systems, and Computer Architecture in a way that is both real and exciting to the students. Plus, each student owns their own TekBot, giving them the ability to "play" with it at home. This system has been expanded into Mechanical Enineering and Computer Science as well, giving students in all four disciplines the chance to see the interactions of their feild with others.
Asked as a high school student looking at colleges -- what school did you go to?
A young, collegiate-looking guy gets into the express checkout line in a supermarket in Cambridge, Mass. The sign clearly says '10 items or less', but he probably has thirty items in his cart.
The cashier looks at him and asks, "Are from Harvard and can't count, or are you from MIT and can't read?"
"Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded."
I liked the vast majority of my EE labs. No boiling water, no waiting days for results.
And on the upside, unlike in a chem lab, when you screw up in an EE lab the only thing that burns is your TA and a component or two.
paintball
Drexel University has been doing this for years. As a matter of fact, it is required for ALL engineers, not just EE, CE, or ECE. All engineers are required to take 3 terms of hands on lab courses dealing with building and testing cicuits and electrical devices. This gives the students practical experience with several tools such as power supplies, volt meters, etc., so they know how to use them later on in other classes as well as projects throughout the life at Drexel. Besides, its fun :) Where else can a Freshman get a chance to melt several houndred thousand dollars worth of equipment by using DecaAmps instead of DeciAmps :)
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"