[sdiy] Pushing practical design

[Aaron Lanterman]

On Mon, 1 May 2006, dustin sedlacek wrote:

> This is a bit off topic, but i wanted to ask Aaron and his student if 
> this class is designed to push practical design? and I was curious as to 
> how the students feel that it will benefit them once they move into the 
> engineering field.

>From day 1 when I started to think about doing this class I wanted to do a 
design project that had something solid in solder as its final project. 
(Mostly - some students are working on comparisons of many circuits - for 
them I'm expecting a more detailed report, but not a final built circuit).

I also wanted to emphasize that designs rarely start from scratch, which 
is why I let them use existing designs as a basis - they just needed to 
mutate and/or crossbreed them in some interesting clever way. I also push 
"take things off the datasheets! that's what they're there for!"

I think our curriculum - well, not just GaTech, but ECE curricula across 
the board - has become way too theoretical. Students don't really 
generally design things in a serious way until ECE4006, our captstone 
senior design class, and even then usually the designs are just 
breadboarded. I think there's value in learning to lay things out on 
perfboard, stripboard, veroboard, whatever you want to call it. If I had 
more time, I'd get into PCB layout.

Not all of my colleagues feel as I do; some feel that this is the sort of 
thing best left to the "technicians" coming out of DeVry. My thought is 
that there's people coming out of DeVry with a better "real" understanding 
of electronics than our students, since they do a lot more hands-on stuff 
in lab and develop intuition, whereas we make our students mostly crank 
through endless paper-and-pencil problem sets.

We make them slog through all this, and then when they're about to 
graduate, then we say "oh, BTW, engineers design stuff!" - I wish we could 
get that earlier in our curriculum.

- Aaron

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Dr. Aaron Lanterman, Asst. Prof.
and Demetrius T. Paris Junior 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
Mail Code 0250                         Web:    users.ece.gatech.edu/~lanterma
Atlanta, GA 30332                      Office: Centergy 5212