[sdiy] Should GaTech go bananas?

[Aaron Lanterman]

On Tue, 27 Dec 2005, limor wrote:

> But... Whats the point of taking a synth design class and then
> building some other guy's modules? You dont need "MOTM" or whatever
> modules to design a synth, for chrissakes, its all in Horowitz & Hill!

Cosmic - I just bought that book at Borders this evening.

> then how the hell would they learn anything? Also, having one module
> to take home ain't so useful, and they're waaay too expensive for
> students. As for plagiarism, spec the labs so they have to know what

Not planning on them taking anything home (unless they want to spring for 
their own parts). It's GaTech parts, so it stays at GaTech... my plan is 
to just keep adding and adding and building up a modular synth over the 
years built my many students.

The point of the MOTM exercise is to learn to put something together. 
Remember, most of these students will have never held a soldering iron. 
Our 4006 design lab coordinators run some "how to solder" labs, but many 
4006 design labs wind up on the breadboard and never get beyond that. Some 
senior design labs involve no hardware at all, which I think is just 
wrong.

> they're designing, & have short written component. They'll cheat anyways 
> but when it comes to final check-offs, either their labkit

Mmmmm... I like the idea of precisely specing thing - if I make them 
just slightly oddball, and make them show me the calculations they used to 
show they expect to meet spec, then it precludes them from directly 
copying another design.

> works or it doesn't. while copying is replete, barely anybody will
> build stuff for others when it comes down to the wire. Just trust me
> on that one.
>
> bitch bitch, moan moan, whats education coming to? :)

Utter lameness, actually. I've only been teaching five years now, and each 
year, the average math skills of the students coming in - and overall 
motivation - seems to be getting weaker and weaker. Why go into EE if 
you're not actually interested in electronics??? I've seen people use the 
following flawed logic on tests:

a + b    a     b
----- = --- + ---
c + d    c     d

and these are kids who, in order to get into the Introduction to Signal 
Processing class I teach (we teach system and signal theory first, 
circuits second at Tech), have allegedly passed calculus.

The distribution of students at GaTech is highly bimodal. Our top students 
are as good as the top students anywhere, and the top mode is overall 
pretty good, but the rest... I wind up spending tons of time helping 
students that I would never in a million years hire as an engineer, or 
recommend that anyone else hire. Some of them get through and graduate and 
get jobs.

I've taught either sophomores or graduate students. This will be my firse 
semester teaching seniors, so hopefully, they will know something, like 
what an op amp is...

- Aaron

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Dr. Aaron Lanterman, Asst. Prof.       Voice:  404-385-2548
School of Electrical and Comp. Eng.    Fax:    404-894-8363
Georgia Institute of Technology        E-mail: lanterma at ece.gatech.edu
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