Many university-level electrical engineering courses continue to use textbooks as curriculum scaffolds, prescribed texts, and/or reference volumes. Textbook reliance is even more pronounced in courses that teach foundational principles of the discipline, such as introductory circuit theory. This paper reports on the conceptual coverage of…

This paper describes a new educational power electronics laboratory that was developed primarily to reinforce experimentally the fundamental concepts presented in a power electronics course. The developed laboratory combines theoretical design, simulation studies, digital control, fabrication, and verification of power-electronic circuits based on…

This paper describes a newly designed upper-level undergraduate and graduate course, Autonomous Mobile Robots. The course employs active, cooperative, problem-based learning and is grounded in the fundamental computational problems in mobile robotics defined by Dudek and Jenkin. Students receive a broad survey of robotics through lectures, weekly…

This paper presents the benefits and costs of providing students with unlimited access to programmable boards in digital design education, allowing hands-on experiences outside traditional laboratory settings. Studies were conducted at three universities in two different countries--Rose Hulman Institute of Technology, Terre Haute, IN; Washington…

This paper describes an initial study of using tablet PCs and interactive course software in integrated circuit (IC) design courses. A rapidly growing community is demonstrating how this technology can improve learning and retention of material by facilitating interaction between faculty and students via cognitive exercises during lectures. While…