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."

Comments

circuit building is important

[frovingslosh]

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.

Re:GO TO DeVry!

[Cowculator]

I just took 6.002 (the standard version) at MIT this spring; it's a required class for all EECS students, even if they're just studying CS (like me). I had lots of electronics experience from high school, so I didn't mind it, but a lot of CS students (that's "Course 6-3" in MIT parlance) truly hate this class because they don't understand it very well and they know the only EE class they'll ever take again is a required signal processing class which is more math than EE.

I don't know if this is what the administration intended when they approved 6.002x, but I think the course could be a great thing for some of the more hardcore CS types who hate the more standard 6.002. If people complain about there being too much theory that, in the end, just reduces to solving one second-order differential equation after another, maybe they would benefit from learning how some of it works in practice. And maybe these CS people will still never take another EE class, but at least they'll know something practical instead of feeling that they've wasted a semester on this, and they'll still have covered the same curriculum as the normal 6.002 students.

If you want a real teaching controversy at MIT, though, go search the Tech's archives (the MIT student newspaper - http://www-tech.mit.edu/) for the words 8.02 TEAL. They've totally replaced the standard (and required for all students who can't handle the significantly harder, much more mathematically-oriented alternative) electricity and magnetism class with a much more participation-intensive format which has the student body largely up in arms; I won't get into it here, but it's a lot more controversial than teaching a self-chosen group of MIT students electronics with real-world examples.

Article glosses over some detail

[pz]

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.