FIE ‘98 - 1

Stimulating Introductory Engineering Courses

with Java

Ronald Danielson

Sally Wood

Santa Clara University

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

FIE ‘98 - 2

Motivations

• Engineering topics are:– complex– layered– interdependent

• Students must– develop context and intuition– be actively engaged in learning

FIE ‘98 - 3

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

FIE ‘98 - 4

WWW as Courseware Delivery Mechanism

• Student-controlled navigation

• Well-defined interface

• Multiple media– continuous and dynamic

• Platform independence

• Wide access

FIE ‘98 - 5

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

FIE ‘98 - 6

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

FIE ‘98 - 13

Lessons Learned

• Exploit layering and links– fine-grained modularity

• Concentrate on class design for reusability– design first

FIE ‘98 - 14

Logic Animation

FIE ‘98 - 15

Truth Table Class

FIE ‘98 - 16

Truth Table Class

FIE ‘98 - 17

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