Electrical Engineering Undergraduate Curriculum

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Electrical Engineering Undergraduate Curriculum

Mark Horowitz with help from Robert Dutton,
Andrea Goldsmith, Nick McKeown, Eric Roberts,Olav
Solgaard, Dwight Nishimura, Ross Venook, Simon
Wong

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Pressure on Curriculum

• The field of Electrical Engineering has continued
  to expand
• Further blurring boundaries with other
  disciplines
• In particular overlap with CS continues to grow 
• Increasing the total amount of material in this
  discipline
• The hard questions are always what to leave out
• Information revolution changing EE
• Dominant consumer, and provider of tools
• Driving up complexity of our systems
• Student backgrounds are changing
• Less strongly tied to the physical world

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Student Background

• Backgrounds are determined by environments
•  Kids environment shaped by information
  revolution
• Their toys are not constrained by physical laws
• Video games use approximate physics
• Everything can talk, move, react
• Computers are omnipresent, dont build
  electronics any more
• Dont build radios worse they dont build
  anything physical
• But have a much better software background
• Have worked with (hacked) large software systems
• More comfortable in the virtual word
• Courses need to provide physical intuition
• Used to dealing in a world with abundant
  information
• Short attention span Delayed gratification is a
  very hard sell

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A Good Curriculum Must

• Provide our students with
• Insights to understand the underlying
  technologies / theory associated with each level
  of complexity,
• Knowledge and skills to choose the appropriate
  abstraction level for each component, making the
  complexity work for them rather than against
  them.
• Present the material in a way that
• Keeps their interest
• Shows the utility when (before) providing the
  solution
• Leverages simulation to demonstrate concepts

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More Specifically

• Motivate students to sample different areas
• Emphasize fundamental principles cut across
  different areas
• Include motivating examples for all the material
  in the core
• Take advantage of the students familiarity with
  virtual
• Arouse the students interest and curiosity in
  hardware
• Broaden the students appreciation of system
  issues
• Familiarize students with different levels of
  system abstraction.

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Goals of Proposed Curriculum

• Alter focus of initial classes to emphasize
  applications
• To try to make the classes more interesting to
  the students
• Decrease the longest chain in the core, by making
  the requirements more parallel
• Enable more options in class selection
• Include lab components in each of the core
  classes
• Provide immediate utility of material, leverage
  comfort with virtual world (simulation) and grow
  coupling to physical world
• Shrink solid-state devices/electronics, expand
  digital systems content in the core

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Key Features of the Proposed Curriculum

• While there are issues with Math and Physics
• Decided someone else should deal with those
  issues
• Also keep E70x (CS106x) requirement
• Change the core to the following

This should be a family of different labs