Stimulating Introductory Engineering Courses with Java

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Stimulating Introductory Engineering Courseswith
Java

• Ronald Danielson
• Sally Wood
• Santa Clara University

Support provided by Hewlett-Packard and 3Com, and
the Santa Clara University Technology Steering
Committee
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Motivations

• Engineering topics are
• complex
• layered
• interdependent
• Students must
• develop context and intuition
• be actively engaged in learning

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Motivations

• New technology
• cost of memory and mips
• interconnection density
• Potential impact on education
• access to multiple methods of presentation
• effective communication to much broader audience
• dynamic presentation of processes and
  interactions
• better communication of complex relationships
• asynchronous personal access

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WWW as Courseware Delivery Mechanism

• Student-controlled navigation
• Well-defined interface
• Multiple media
• continuous and dynamic
• Platform independence
• Wide access

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Application Areas

• Introductory programming
• Basic concepts in EE
• power, energy, voltage current, sinusoidal
  signals, time constants, feedback, transducers
• Understanding digital technologies
• semiconductor devices and processing, logic
  design, computer architecture, software
  development and systems, computer networks

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Approach

• Courseware modules
• Use for enrichment
• Provide options for student experience
• short text segments
• links to more in-depth explanations
• varied interaction and control

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Lecture
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Demonstration
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Examples
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Free Interaction
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Accomplishments

• Java tutorial
• Simple logic circuit animations
• Network concept animations
• Basic classes for further development

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Lessons Learned

• Java is growing and changing
• incompatibilities
• Thread programming is hard
• and performs inconsistently
• Video is fun but hard to use effectively
• Tutorials for learning are very different from
  CAD tools

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Lessons Learned

• Exploit layering and links
• fine-grained modularity
• Concentrate on class design for reusability
• design first

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Logic Animation
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Truth Table Class
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Truth Table Class
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Future Work

• Restructure Java tutorial
• add evaluation questions
• Redo logic design animations
• based on uniform underlying class structure
• Design uniform class structures for
• transistor circuits
• CPU architectures