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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?
"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 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
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?
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
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.
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!
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
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
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
I've been interested in a new job for a while now ...
Do they teach you how to fix VCRs?
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.
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.
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-
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.
"lots of hands on experience in your parents' garage before you discovered girls."
Sorry, I was reading Playboy when I was four. Also Hustler, Penthouse, Chic, Oui, Marie, and a few lesser-known mags. And by the age of six, I was playing doctor with the neighborgirl. I certainly never thought of using a soldering iron then though, those things can burn you.
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."
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
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.
In defense of the curriculum for your optics course, understanding the electromagnetic theory of light is vital for understanding the intersection of electronics and optics (fiber optic communication, lasers, photosensors, etc). In most of these equations, many of the same approaches used to analyze microwave and radio can be used, it's just that the wavelength is much shorter. In the case of photolithography, electromagnetic wave theory is needed to determine the resolution of an imaging system like a projection system for photolithography, which in turn limits the feature size. The theory behind this is directly analogous to the theory explaining the resolution limits of radar. To be honest, ABCD matrices and lens equations and such don't really need that much coverage--maybe a week or two of lecture and a problem set or two to get familiar with using them. If you ever need to use the ABCD matrices or lens equations, you can always look them up.
If you really want to learn lens design or otherwise specialize in optics should go to schools like my alma mater or possibly our intellectual rival.
"It take 9 months to bear a child, no matter how many women you assign to the job."
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.