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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...
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
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.
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