Tool to support computer architecture teaching and learning

Contribution: This work evaluates the role of the complementary training programs (CTPs) offered by the Center for Research and Development in Electronic and Information Technology (CETELI), from the Federal University of Amazonas, Brazil. This analysis highlights the relevant role of the CTP, carried out by CETELI, in supporting students in the engineering undergraduate course, thus reducing dropouts and improving retention of low-income students. Background: The great challenge of engineering courses and of all courses in the technological area is to keep in step with the job market and, thus, provide better conditions for entering trainees. Intended Outcomes: Based on the experience of this work, other electrical engineering courses should be encouraged to adopt partnerships with industries, offering the possibility for students to carry out project activities on topics of interest to industries and, especially in developing countries like Brazil, to associate this activity with the provision of scholarships. Application Design: The evaluation assesses the impact of the various CTP partnership projects (PPs) on the graduation rate (GR), on students’ academic performance, and on the average graduation time (GT). It also assesses how the CTP students entered the job market, measuring whether the CTP facilitated their entry. Findings: It was observed a difference in the GR between the students who participated in the CTP and students that did not participate in the CTP. For the computer engineering course, this rate was about five times higher. It was observed that more than half of the students who participated in the CTP entered the market and were hired almost immediately for work in their area of training.

The purpose of this study was to determine the effectiveness of using Virtual Reality-Based virtual laboratories on student learning outcomes in the Internet of Things Course in the Electrical Engineering Study Program, the average difference in student learning outcomes through the use of Virtual Reality-Based virtual laboratories in the Internet of Things Course in the Engineering Study Program Electrical Engineering, and student learning motivation through the use of Virtual Reality-Based virtual laboratories in the Internet of Things Course in the Electrical Engineering Study Program. This research is an experimental research approach that will be used is Quasi Experimental Design with the form of Nonequivalent Control Group Design. The validation test was carried out by measurement experts for post-test and pre-test questions, each aspect was tested by two experts. The results of the study show the effectiveness of using Virtual Reality-Based virtual laboratories to improve student learning outcomes in the Internet of Things Course in the Electrical Engineering Study Program. The increase in student learning outcomes analyzed using N-gain in the experimental class obtained an average value of 0.65 including the medium category, and the average N-gain for the control class was 0.15 in the low category. Meanwhile, the average difference in student learning outcomes through the effectiveness of using Virtual Reality-Based virtual laboratories in the Internet of Things Course in the Electrical Engineering Study Program is significantly and significantly different. The results of the experimental class data analysis obtained the t_count > t table value, namely 8,351 > 2,003 and the Sig. (2-tailed) 0.005 <0.05, then Ha is accepted, meaning that there is a difference in the average student learning outcomes after using a virtual reality-based virtual laboratory in the internet of things course in the Electrical Engineering Study Program. Student motivation through the use of Virtual Reality-Based virtual laboratories in Internet of Things Courses in the Engineering Study Program can increase very well

Special issue on <i>specialized</i> computer architecture simulators that see the present and may hold the future

This research was developed in the Master in Education of the Federal University of Uberlândia, in the period 2001/2002, with the objective of analyzing the knowledge and practices failures in the teaching-learning process of the Electrical Engineering course at UFU, with a focus on understanding the forms, meaning and function of evaluative practices in failures in the context of the subjects surveyed (students, teachers); seeking to apprehend the relationship between social representations about this phenomenon and its repercussions on the interactions between teacher and student, in the teaching-learning process and in the perpetuation or transformation of educational practices carried out in the Electrical Engineering course at UFU. It is a research with an emphasis on qualitative aspects, but which contains many quantitative data that served as a subsidy for the choice of the interviewed subjects, of the researched aspects, and to present the failure rates in the period from 1997 to 2001 in a more systematic way , referring to the disciplines common to the two emphases existing in the course: Electronics and Electrotechnics. The interviewed subjects were eight students who had already taken the five subjects that presented the highest failure rates in the defined period, which are: Electromagnetism, Material Mechanics, Electrical Circuits 1, Differential and Integral Calculus 3 and Electrical Materials 1; and three teachers from those same disciplines. In the interviews, in the However, the focus was not only on the five disciplines mentioned, because what was sought to understand and analyze in a more approximate way was the factors that caused the failures, without specifying any discipline. It was based on the assumption that there were ideas, attitudes, behaviors produced in the space socially shared by the group and that these circulated and strongly influenced the perpetuation of failures, which is characteristic of a social representation. To better understand the phenomenon of failures, a historic rescue of the Faculty of Electrical Engineering at UFU was carried out, engineering education and training was discussed in general and a study on learning assessment. The analyzes developed here show that the facing the problem of failures in the Electrical Engineering course at UFU, as well as engineering courses at other institutions implies improving the teaching-learning process learning and training of engineering teachers. It also implies the need for a dynamic and global understanding of the context and everyday life of the course, in order to break with those conservative and authoritarian views, attitudes and practices that favor the perpetuation of phenomena such as failures, and that generate passivity and conformism. between teachers and students.

In response to the demand for cultivating high-quality applied professionals with both engineering and humanistic qualities in the new era, contemporary university education not only undertakes the responsibility of imparting professional knowledge and skills, but also shoulders the responsibility of ideological and political education for students. This article design the teaching process and evaluation system of Electrical Engineering courses in order to cultivate engineers with both moral integrity and professional competence.Through course learning, students will not only master the basic knowledge and corresponding skills of electrical and electronic technology, but also possess the spirit of striving for excellence as a national craftsman, with a sense of serving the country through science and technology.And the students will be able to undertake the mission of the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation. By studying the teaching mode of electrical engineering courses, reference value is provided for the reform and innovation of higher education related majors and teaching curriculum systems

Summary form only given. Minimal requirements for electrical engineering and computer engineering courses are examined. It is noted that, at the undergraduate level, the introduction of courses such as digital systems, programming languages, microprocessors, and computer architecture in an electrical engineering degree which has remained at four-years duration has necessitated a corresponding reduction of courses in traditional areas such as electromagnetics and control. As a consequence, today's electrical engineer is much mode knowledgeable in computers but less sophisticated in analytical methods than those of 20 years ago. While this shift in educational goals is inevitable, and probably desirable for the industry-bound engineer with a B.S. degree, it poses serious problems in graduate study and research. >

This article analyzes 10 electrical engineering undergraduate courses in Brazil. The analysis was performed using several institutional indices, namely, the National Student Proficiency Exam (ENADE), Preliminary Concept of the Degree (CPC), General Index of the Degree (IGC), Institutional Concept (CI) and Human Development Index (HDI). A regional analysis confirmed that the undergraduate electrical engineering courses in the north-northeast region of Brazil have a different structure from that of institutions in the south-southeast of the country. The courses at universities in the south-southeast region have the best institutional indicators, however, in general they have the lowest workloads. The total workloads range from 4974 hours (the largest) to 3600 hours (the lowest). Three electrical engineering courses have workloads that exceed 4000 hours (the Federal University of Santa Catarina [UFSC], the Federal University of Bahia [UFBA] and the Federal University of Para [UFPA]). On the other hand, of the top 4 courses with the highest scores in ENADE: UFSC, (the Federal University of Minas Gerais [UFMG], the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul [UFRGS] and the University of Brasilia [UNB]), only one of them, UFSC, has a workload that exceeds 4000 hours.

This article describes the introductory two-semester course in electrical engineering that has been developed over a period of five years at Princeton University. The aims of the course are to provide an introduction to the field of electrical engineering via the basic concepts of electricity and magnetism (which are developed through Maxwell's equations in the integral form), to apply these concepts in developing the fundamentals of energy conversion and circuit theory, and to carry forward, in a continuous and integrated way, a modern treatment of network analysis. Thus, the treatment proceeds from field ideas to circuits and physical apparatus, and to their mathematical models. With the circuit relations formulated, attention turns to the analysis of networks, starting with network topology and extending through pole-zero ideas. The treatment stops just short of the Laplace transform. This course is intended to serve as a foundation for subsequent courses such as electronic circuits, energy conversion, and advanced network analysis and synthesis, and has been developed with the purpose of providing the student with a unifying point of view for these varied topics.

The subject of physiological modeling has been introduced in two conventional electrical engineering courses. Models of the respiratory process, waste generation, oxygen exchange, enzyme kinetics, and blood flow have been introduced. Although most engineering students have little background in physiology, it has been possible to introduce models that can be useful in the design of medical devices that must be compatible with a complex system.

The initial phase of undergraduate engineering degree programmes often comprises courses requiring mathematical expertise which in some cases clearly exceeds school mathematics, but will be imparted only later in mathematics courses. In this article, an approach addressing this challenge by way of example within a fundamentals of electrical engineering course is presented. The concept focuses on gaining specific mathematical knowledge and competencies in the technical context of this course. For this purpose, a complementary blended learning scenario centring around a web-based learning platform and involving an adaptation of the course was developed. The concept particularly considers the heterogeneity of today's student groups and is discussed with regard to related approaches, didactical considerations, and technical implementation. For the interventions, the results of a questionnaire-based evaluation proving students' acceptance and positive influence on examination performance are presented.

For educational purposes there is a need to teach electrical and computer engineering students the basics of the design of state machines using programmable logic devices, and for students interested in mobile robots to teach them the basics of mobile robots' behaviors. At the same time one of the topics of interest in the mobile robot's community is how to generate their new behaviors, using state machines, automatically. This paper discusses how to create mobile robots' behaviors using genetic algorithms (GAs), implementing them in programmable logic devices (FPGAs) and how these behaviors can be programmed by students in a mobile robotics course. The behaviors are encoded as algorithm state machines and using feed-forward artificial neural networks (ANN). In the state-machine approach, each individual's chromosome represents, given a set of inputs coming from the sensors and the current state, both the next state and the outputs that control the robot's movements. In the ANN approach, whose weights are found also with GAs, a pipeline architecture was built to perform it, each pipeline executes a layer of the ANN, thus once the pipeline is full the execution speed of the ANN is one sensors' clock cycle. We evaluate the behaviors generated by the GA according to a fitness function that grades their performance for avoiding obstacles. The inputs to such a robot are infrared sensors to detect obstacles, the outputs are the velocities of its wheels. Our objectives are first, to prove that GAs are a good option as a method for finding behaviors for mobile robots' navigation, and second, that these behaviors can be implemented in an efficient way in FPGAs. We tested both behaviors in a small mobile robot, that is build in an electrical engineering course that teaches how to build mobile robots.

This paper presents the preliminary outcome of an ongoing study conducted on engineering students in a non-major course in electrical engineering. The goal of this study is to better understand the reasons for lower levels of performance in non-major engineering courses. We accomplish this by assessing student perceptions and attitudes towards learning, and measuring their understanding of core concepts related to a specific topic. Analyses of data collected to-date points towards some inherent flaws in common teaching methodology. We anticipate that this study will lead to a restructuring of these service courses to make them more relevant and conceptually grounded. Additionally, the development of reliable subject specific instruments as used in this study could be the basis for a broader framework which could be used for other engineering courses.

In this paper, we present a detailed action plan under continuous quality improvement (CQI) exercise of outcomes based education framework related to Mathematics concerns highlighted by the Electrical Engineering (EE) Department. Failing and low performed student learning outcomes (SOs) and course learning outcomes (COs) in range of core EE courses were observed to be linked with weak Mathematics basis of students. This feedback was achieved through an automated CQI system in EvalTools under Faculty Class Assessment Report (FCAR) tab, where each instructor is required to make reflections about failing as well as low performed SOs and COs. Feedback was reviewed comprehensively, and mathematical concepts which significantly affect the performance of students in the core EE courses were derived. Moreover, a high level of Mathematics pre-requisite covering required mathematical concepts is identified for the range of core EE courses. Consequently, well-defined tasks were assigned to continuously evaluate and monitor improvement in required Mathematics concepts to ensure SOs and COs achieved in core EE courses. Results are given to exhibit the effectiveness of continuous improvement management system (CIMS).

As the ease of the information through the internet increases, distance learning of many courses can now be made through web. Many good web sites programmed from various educational institutions are now available for their students to download lecture notes, study web-based material and attend web-lectures. Some of them even have web-based video lectures or seminars. However, there still exist problems of this way of teaching especially for engineering courses because the laboratory class is fundamental to understand theoretical notes, and has difficulty to be conducted through the internet. In the past, student cannot get any experiment via internet because most of them are only computer simulation rather than real experiment. This is understandable because the web-based hardware implementation is difficult especially in electrical engineering where high frequency, high power operation, and a lot of parameters are to be controlled and recorded and thus are difficult to be connected and controlled by the remote access. However today, with the rapid development of internet tools, electronics, and software this situation can be sorted out . It is primordial and interesting to let students have real practice and doing real experiment at anytime and everywhere with the condition that the internet connection is available. This paper gives an overview of the recent development in the VLE and examines how Web-Based course may be delivered and the way of implementing and designing a particular types of Electrical Engineering Course (theory and laboratory), to assist and advance learning endeavors in electrical engineering programs at Riyadh College of Technology, and finally some recommendations are given.

The expansion in the fields of optical engineering and optoelectronics has made it essential to introduce optical engineering concepts into undergraduate courses and curricula. Because of limits on the number of course requirements for the B.S. degree, it is not clear how these topics should be introduced without replacing some of the traditional requirements. This paper demonstrates how optical engineering concepts can be easily presented as an integral part of electrical engineering subjects, with a minimal amount of replacement, while enhancing the depth and understanding of both fields. Courses such as linear signals and systems, electricity and magnetism, and electronics which traditionally represent the core requirements of the undergraduate electrical engineering curriculum contain subjects that have direct correlations with optical engineering concepts. The major changes that are needed are the creation of textbooks that contain concepts and examples in areas of both optical and electrical engineering and some relearning and familiarization on the part of instructors. This approach allows for a fresh look at courses being offered in electrical engineering, while providing the necessary background in optical engineering for students.