Restructuring Of An Electronics Lab Using Comprehensive Student Feedback

SUNY Oswego is engaged in introducing two new engineering programs. Last year, a software engineering program was approved and a new Electrical and Computer Engineering program, supported by the Computer Science and Physics departments, is progressing in its development. As a transition effort, two tracks were thought of: an electrical engineering track in Physics and a computer engineering track in Computer Science. In an effort to establish the electrical engineering track in Physics, some of the physics courses are revised. The present paper describes the restructuring of an Electronics lab course currently taught mainly to Physics majors. As part of the modification, the previous labs were initially revised and the new developments were tested on last year’s students. The course has to meet engineering accreditation requirements while serving the needs of Physics and Computer Science majors. Accordingly, the old versions of the labs were standardized to unitary presentation, new labs were introduced, and student feedback on the relevance of topics, quality, and further development needs was recorded on a regular basis. The lab content was integrated with the Electronics course that it essentially serves. The lab experience and the collected feedback are being used for writing a laboratory manual and further fine tuning will be performed with the help of the incoming students enrolled in the course. The experience with restructuring the course and blending in the students’ needs has been very positive and the lessons learned from this initiative may prove useful to other instructors in their own approach to modifying electrical engineering labs.