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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."
"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...
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.
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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
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
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!
I expect (and hope) that he also had a healthy fear of his father after that episode.
This post is dedicated to all of those
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.
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
Oh good, we were being overrun by a bunch of no-names like Abelson and Sussman.... ;-)
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I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells.
-- Dr. Seuss
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.
Why do people assume it's either one or the other? This is not theory XOR practicality here, folks. What they're doing is combining the two, teaching the theory but placing it in a practical framework so students understand what they're learning AND why. How can this possibly be a bad thing? The way it's done now is like teaching CS without having students write programs, or teaching chemistry without doing lab experiments... it's ridiculous!
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
All the beginner circuits run at 12volt with minimal current so they are quite safe.
"You can now flame me, I am full of love,"
Why don't you just keep on rubbing in how cool the classes that I'll never get to take are?
Sadly, i don't find this funny. I'm a current EE student, going into my 5th year (i co-oped). We're on semesters, btw. Math is way too focused upon. Sure, it's cool, but 3 semesters of Calculus that we NEVER use, only to get to Differential Equations that we ALWAYS use. Personally, i think math/physics (i had to take 3 physics classes) classes could be condensed into 4 semesters, and improved, in focusing on matrices, and DE. And, i've talked to EE students from other schools (purdue included), and the programs are quite similar.
What the problem is, is that during the Dot-Bust, everyone focused everything on computers. Sure, i like computers, they're great. But if i wanted to be a computer engineer, i'd go into Computer engineering. Alas, EE got so focused on computers that it really lost its overall focus on electricity, and its applications. And, when designing IC's, the work is almost all math. Blah.
Some things that are lacking in EE: Motors of any kind, a focus on Controls, Real life transmission lines, rather than all microstrip lines, and more early EE classes. We didn't start circuits until Sophomore year. True, my university is changing the program, but this is a widespread problem that needs addressed in order to keep the world supplied with competent Engineers.
if you're serious as an electronic engineer then you had lots of hands on experience in your parents' garage
You're the second person to post something like this and it bothers me. I'm an EECS grad and I never built circuits in my parents' garage. I grew up in a rural town and my parents know nothing about electronics, so there was no one to teach me; I didn't get any EE experience at all until the summer before college, and the intro classes were my first experience where anything made sense. Does this mean I shouldn't be an EE? That seems unnecessarily exclusive.
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.
Math you never use... hehe.
... and I never again asked "what possible use is this mathematics that I am learning"?
Funny, I used to say that when I was a student. What the heck to you really use Laplace transforms for I asked? Later in digital signal processing class as I was designed filters I found out.
Surely nobody really uses complex analysis - I mean, what do trig functions of complex numbers mean? Later in grad school studying electromagnetics, I found that wave reflection/refraction with complex angles meant attenuation for the refracted wave, and it was a way to handle polarization of all waves involved.
Humph. No way would I use conformal mapping... until I found myself mapping the integers onto a circle in order to solve a potential distribution.
Aha, I know there isn't any real use of integration in the complex plane. I mean, tracing out paths and detouring around zeroes, slices and branches? One lecture started up with that exact chart, solving some antenna radiation pattern by integrating from negative infinity to infinity along the complex plane. I was lost
I hope you don't plan to major in engineering. Theory is important, but experimental or "hands-on" intution is a vital for any engineer. Otherwise, as the Purdue example illustrates, you will spec something for your design which is physically unrealizable, or is too expensive, too large, too heavy or otherwise ill-suited for your application.
"It take 9 months to bear a child, no matter how many women you assign to the job."
Please stick with this attitude.
It makes my degree "hands on" worth more, I am the
one they call to consult when your theoretical design fails.
Also, we never had to take physics lab. i took a chem lab, but that's it, besides all my circuits labs. labs take a lot of time and effort for the few credits their worth, so maybe they don't require as many for that reason?
We started a class to replace Linear Algebra for engineers this past year. Basically, an engineer told a VERY good math prof what we needed to learn and focus on. I'd already taken linear, so i didn't have to take this new classs. However, the idea of an engineer prof and math prof working together is just awesome.