Designing courses to teach design—draft 4

Today I tried practicing my talk for Wednesday with my son as an audience (I figured I could get some useful feedback from him based on his years of theater experience). He asked me a number of good questions about my audience and what effect I wanted to have on them (the same sort of questions I ask my students, but often have difficulty applying myself). He gave me some good advice about changing the tone of my talk, making it more conversational and less lecturing.  (I’m good at that in my usual improvisational lecture style, but I know that I couldn’t keep to time if I tried to be extemporaneous with this material.)

After getting his suggestions, I rewrote the talk and delivered it to him again.  It runs about 9 minutes, and my target is “under 10 minutes”, so I think the length is about right. I welcome suggestions from my readers also—the talk isn’t until Wednesday, so I may have time to make more revisions.

Because of the time constraints, I’m going to read my talk—something I’ve never done before, so forgive me if the presentation is a bit awkward.

I want to talk to you today about two courses I created in the past two years. These courses were in part a reaction against the University pressure to create MOOCs. University education is not supposed to be mega-lecture courses, but students getting detailed feedback on their work from experts.

The courses I’m talking about are not easy, cheap fixes (like was claimed for MOOCs)—they are high-contact, hands-on courses, which take a lot of time to create and teach, and so are expensive to offer.

Designing the courses started from goals and constraints: “what problem was I trying to solve?” and “what resources were available?”

The two problems I was trying to solve were in the bioengineering curriculum:

• students weren’t getting enough engineering design practice (and that mostly in the senior year, which is much too late) and
• too many students were selecting the biomolecular concentration, where we were exceeding our capacity for senior capstone and senior thesis projects.  The other concentrations were under-enrolled.

The main constraints were that

• there was no room in the curriculum for adding more required courses,
• there were no resources for new lab space or equipment, and
• all existing engineering design courses had huge prerequisite chains.

Because I couldn’t ask someone else to create and teach a new course, the content had to be something I already knew or could learn quickly. So, no wet labs!

The first course I’ll talk about is a replacement for the previously required EE 101 circuits course. The EE course is a theory class that prepares students to do design in later courses—but most bioengineering students never take those later courses, so were getting prepared for something they didn’t do. (That’s a general problem in the bioengineering program—“creeping prerequistism” in the 8 or 9 departments providing courses results in the students always preparing to do stuff, and not getting to the doing until senior year.)

The goal of the new Applied Circuits for Bioengineers course is to have students design and build simple amplifiers to interface biosensors to computers. We work with a range of sensors from easy ones like thermistors, microphones, and phototransistors to more difficult ones like EKG electrodes and strain-gauge pressure sensors.

The goal is for students to do design in every lab, even the first one where they know almost no electronics, and to write detailed design reports on each lab—not fill-in-the-blank worksheets, like they get in other intro labs.

The course was designed around the weekly design projects, not around topics that must be covered. Themes emerged only after the design projects were selected—the class comes back again and again to variations on voltage dividers, complex impedance, and op amps with negative feedback.

There wasn’t a textbook available that covered things the way I wanted, so the students use free online materials instead. The savings on textbooks is used to justify a lab fee of  about $130 for tools and parts. They don’t get just a few parts, but 20 each of 64 different sizes of resistors and 10 each of 25 different sizes of capacitors, along with a microprocessor board and lots of other tools and parts. I don’t want their designs to be multiple-choice questions (“there are only 5 resistors in the kit—so one of them must be the right answer”).

Coming up with usable design exercises was hard—I tried lots of them at home, rejecting some as too hard, some as too easy, and tweaking others until they seemed feasible. I even designed three different custom printed circuit boards for the course: a board for pressure sensors, a hysteresis oscillator for soldering practice, and a prototyping board for their two instrumentation-amplifier projects. (pass boards around)

By the way, PC board design has gotten very cheap—I used free tools for doing the design, and the boards themselves cost only 50¢ to $1—it would have cost thousands to have done custom boards like this when I was first hired at UCSC.

Developing a hands-on course like this is not quick—creating the course took me almost 6 months of full-time effort!—so we’re probably not going to see huge numbers of such courses being started. But they’re worth it!

To make it somewhat easier for someone who wants to create a similar course, I posted all my notes on designing the course on my blog—over 100 blog posts before class even started! There are now around 240 posts (the URL is on the quarter-page handout, along with the URL for the course syllabus and lab assignments).

The course was prototyped last year as BME 194+194F “Group Tutorial” before being submitted to CEP for approval. Incidentally, I highly recommend prototyping before submitting the paperwork for new courses—there were a lot of changes that came out of the prototype run. For example, the lab time was increased from 3 hours to 6 hours a week.

That change has a high cost—not only am I spending over 10 hours a week of direct classroom and lab time, but I’m spending every weekend this quarter rewriting all the lab handouts—splitting the material between the lab times and adding at-home or in-class design exercises between the two parts. Even with the extra lab time, some labs ran over this quarter, so I’ve got still more tweaking to do for next year.

It isn’t just the design of a new course that is expensive—each time the course is offered takes a lot of faculty time. In addition to the 10 hours a week of direct contact, I have office hours, grading, prep time for both labs and lectures, and rewriting the lab handouts.  If I have 2 lab sections next year, I’ll have 16 hours a week of direct contact. Just providing feedback on the 5–10-page weekly design reports takes about 15 minutes per student per week (half an hour per report).

But enough about the circuits course.

The other course I want to talk about is one I created last quarter: a new freshman design seminar in conjunction with the student Biomedical Engineering Society. This course has no prereqs, is only 2 units, and does not count towards any major or campus requirements (it might get a “Collaborative Endeavor” gen-ed code).
I’d not taught a freshman class in over a decade, having taught mainly seniors and grad students, so I had no idea what skills and interests the students would bring to the class. With no prereqs for the course, I couldn’t assume that students had any relevant skills, though it turned out that all this year’s students had had biology, chemistry, and at least conceptual physics in high school.

Because I didn’t know what to expect, I didn’t choose the projects ahead of time, but tried to adapt the course on the fly to what the students could do and what they wanted to do.  (They wanted to do more than they could do in the time available, of course.)

I did try out three or four projects ahead of time, looking for design projects with a low entry barrier. But all the projects I tried assumed some computer programming skills, and only one student had ever done any computer programming—a big hole in California high school education.  Even more concerning for engineering majors is that only a few had any experience building anything. (AP physics classes were the most common exposure to building something.)

On the first-day survey the students indicated an interest in learning some programming and electronics, so we did a little programming with an Arduino microcontroller board—I’ll try to up that content next year, adding some more electronics.

The class started with generic design concepts using a photospectrometer as an example. The concepts include such basics as specifying design goals and constraints, dividing a problem into subproblems, interface specification, and iterative design. The photospectrometer turned out to be too complex and unfamiliar to students, and I’ll probably start with a simpler design (perhaps a colorimeter) next year, and have the students design, build, and program it before they start on their own projects.

One positive thing—the course had more women than men, and at the end of the course they indicated that the course had made them more likely to continue in engineering!

I could go on all afternoon about these courses, but I’m running out of time, so I’ll leave you with these take-away messages:

• The value of University education is in doing things and getting detailed feedback from experts, not sitting in lectures.
• Students should be solving real problems with multiple solutions, not fill-in-the-blank or multiple-choice toy exercises.
• Hands-on courses require a lot of time from the professors, both to create and to run, and so they are expensive to offer.
• Failure to teach such courses, though, makes a University education no longer worthy of the name.

UPDATE 2014 May 2: video available online (as a 784 Mbyte downloadable .mov file) from So you think your lecture course is better than a MOOC? April 23, 2014. I was the second of six speakers.

 

Designing courses to teach design—draft 3

The talk I was scheduled to give last quarter (2014 Feb 24) was rescheduled, because two of the four speakers were unable to make that date.  It is now scheduled for Wed 2014 Apr 23  at 3:30 in the Merrill Cultural Center, which used to be the Merrill Dining Hall, before they consolidated dining halls in the east colleges. There are now 6 speakers in 90 minutes, which means 15 minutes each (maybe 10 minutes speaking, 5 minutes for questions).  I’ll have to run over from my class which ends at 3:10 on the opposite side of campus (0.6 miles, 13 minutes according to Google Maps), though running may be difficult along the crowded sidewalks between classes.

The talk needs to be updated from last quarter, as I have now taught prototype runs for both the applied circuits class and the freshman design class, and am in the second run of the applied circuits class.

Here is my current draft of the text—please give me some suggestions in the comments for improvement.  The ending seems particularly awkward to me, but I’m having trouble fixing it.

Designing Courses to Teach Design

I believe that the main value of a University education does not come from MOOCable mega-lecture courses, but from students working in their field and getting detailed feedback on that work. I’ll talk today about some courses I’ve created ths year and last to teach students to do engineering design. These courses are high-contact, hands-on courses—the antithesis of MOOC courses.

Design starts from goals and constraints: “what problem are you trying to solve?” and “what resources are available?” So what were my goals and constraints?

The two problems I was trying to solve were in the bioengineering curriculum:

1. students weren’t getting enough engineering design practice (and what they were getting was mostly in the senior year, which is much too late) and
2. too many students were selecting the biomolecular concentration, where we were exceeding our capacity for senior capstone and senior thesis projects.  The other concentrations were under-enrolled.

The main constraints were that

1. there was no room in the curriculum for adding required courses,
2. there were no resources for new lab space or equipment, and
3. all relevant engineering courses had huge prerequisite chains.

Furthermore, I would have to teach any new course myself, so the content had to be something I already knew or could learn quickly. Those constraints meant the new course would not have wet labs (though I have encouraged wet-lab faculty to add design exercises to their existing courses).

My first partial solution was to replace the required EE circuits course with a new Applied Circuits course. The existing EE101 course is a theory class (mostly applied math) that prepares students to do design in later courses—but most bioengineering students never take those later courses, so were getting prepared for something they didn’t do. Due to “creeping prerequistism” in the 8 or 9 departments providing courses for the major, the bioengineering students were already taking far too many preparatory courses and far too few courses where they actually did things.

The goal of the new course is to have students design and build simple amplifiers to interface biosensors to computers. I chose a range of sensors from easy ones like thermistors, microphones, and phototransistors to ones more difficult to interface like EKG electrodes and strain-gauge pressure sensors. I’m not interested in cookbook, fill-in-the-blank labs—I want students to experience doing design in every lab, even the first one where they knew almost no electronics—and I want them to write detailed design reports on each lab, not fill-in-the-blank worksheets, like they get in chem and physics labs, and even intro EE labs.

The course was designed around the weekly design projects, not around preset topics that must be covered. Themes emerged only after the design projects were selected—the class comes back again and again to variations on voltage dividers, complex impedance, and op amps with negative feedback.

Students used a free online textbook rather than buying one, but bought about $90 of tools and parts. I tried out every potential design exercise at home—rejecting some as too hard, some as too easy, and tweaking others until they seemed feasible. I designed and had fabricated three different printed circuit boards for the course (not counting two boards which I redesigned after testing the lab at home).  One of the PC boards is a prototyping board for students to solder their own amplifier designs for the pressure-sensor and EKG labs. (Pass boards around.)

Developing a hands-on course like this is not a trivial exercise. I spent about 6 months almost full time working on the course design (without course relief). I made over 100 blog posts about the design of the course before class even started, and I now have over 230 posts (the URL is on the quarter-page handout, along with the URL for the course syllabus and lab assignments).  Since the posts average a couple of pages, this is more writing than a textbook (though not nearly as organized).

The course was prototyped last year as BME 194+194F “Group Tutorial” before being submitted to CEP for approval, and I wrote up notes after each class or lab (another 60 or so blog posts). Last year’s prototyping lead me to increase the lab time from 3 hours to 6 hours a week, which means I’m spending a lot of time this quarter rewriting all the lab handouts—splitting the material between the lab times and adding at-home or in-class design exercises between the two parts. Some of the fixes have worked well (students got comfortable plotting their data with gnuplot weeks earlier this year), but we’ve still run over time in some labs, even with 6 hours a week of lab, so more tweaking is needed.

This course is expensive in terms of professor time: I’m spending over 10 hours a week of direct classroom and lab time (not counting office hours, grading, prep time, or rewriting the lab handouts). Just providing feedback on the 5–10-page weekly design reports takes about 15 minutes per student per week (half an hour per report).

The students taking Applied Circuits last year were mostly seniors who had been avoiding EE 101, rather than the sophomores I’d intended the class for. This year, I have juniors and seniors, but still no sophomores. So the course still does not provide early exposure to engineering design, nor does it direct more students to the bioelectronics concentration rather than the biomolecular one (those there’s still hope for the latter).

My second partial solution was to create a new freshman design seminar in conjunction with the student Biomedical Engineering Society. This course has no prereqs, is only 2 units, and does not count towards any major or campus requirements.

Unlike the Applied Circuits course, I didn’t choose the design projects for this course ahead of time, because I had no idea what skills and interests the students would bring to the class—I’d not taught a freshman class in over a decade, having taught mainly seniors and grad students. I did try out 3 or 4 design projects on my own to gauge the skills needed to do them, but those projects all assumed some computer programming skills.

I prototyped the freshman design course last quarter as BME 94F and have submitted course forms to CEP for approval. Once again, I blogged notes after each class meeting (only about 39 posts, though—this was a less intensive effort on my part).

With no prereqs, I couldn’t assume that students had any relevant skills, though it turned out that all this year’s students had had biology, chemistry, and at least conceptual physics in high school. Only one student had ever done any computer programming, though—a big hole in California high school education—and only a few had any experience building anything. (AP physics classes were the most common exposure to building something.) On the first-day survey the students indicated an interest in learning some programming and electronics, so we did a little programming with an Arduino microcontroller board—I’ll try to up that content next year.

I started out teaching generic design concepts using a photospectrometer as an example. The concepts include specifying design goals and constraints, dividing a problem into subproblems, interface specification, and iterative design.The photospectrometer turned out to be too complex, and I’ll probably start with a simpler colorimeter next year, and have the students design, build, and program it before they start on their own projects.

My third partial solution has been a complete overhaul of the bioengineering curriculum, which is currently before CEP for approval. No new courses were created for this overhaul, but all the concentrations were changed. For example, half the chemistry courses were removed from concentrations other than biomolecular, to make room for more courses in electronics, robotics, psychology, or computer science. And some the orphan math courses were removed from the biomolecular concentration to make room for more advanced biology. Long-term, I’m hoping to convince some of the other departments to remove excessive prerequisites, so that students can take more interesting and useful courses before their senior year.

I could go on all afternoon about these courses and curriculum design, but I’m running out of  time, so I’ll leave you with these take-away messages:

1. The value of University education is in detailed feedback from professors in labs and on written reports, not in the lectures.
2. Students should be solving real problems with multiple solutions, not fill-in-the-blank or multiple-choice toy exercises.
3. These courses require a lot of time from the professors, and so they are expensive to offer.
4. Failure to teach such courses, though, makes the University education no longer worthy of the name.

For those of you not present—the quarter-page handout will have the URLs for this blog’s table of contents pages for the circuits course and the freshman design course, in addition to the two class web pages:

• http://users.soe.ucsc.edu/~karplus/bme101/
• http://users.soe.ucsc.edu/~karplus/bme94f/

In addition to the quarter-page handout, I also plan to have copies of the prototyping board (both bare boards and ones that I used for testing out EKG or instrumentation amp circuits), one of the pressure sensors (on another PC board I designed), and the hysteresis oscillator boards.  If I can get it working again, I may also wear the blinky EKG while I’m talking.

Preparing this talk has been weird for me—I can’t remember ever having scripted out a talk to this level of detail.  For research talks, I usually spend many hours designing slides, and relying on the slides to trigger the appropriate talk. For classes, I usually think obsessively about the material for a day or two ahead of time, sometimes writing down a few key words to trigger my memory, but mainly giving an extemporaneous performance that relies heavily on audience participation. I had one memorable experience where a student asked me for a copy of my lecture notes after a class—I handed her the 1″ PostIt that had my notes, but warned her that I’d only covered the first word that day, and that it would take the rest of the week to cover the rest.

Doing this short a talk without slides and without time to rehearse will probably require me to read the talk—something else I’ve never done. (I know, I should have rehearsed during our one-week spring break, but I had a 2-day RNA research symposium, a faculty meeting about who we would offer our faculty slot to, meetings with grad students, and feverish rewriting of the first few lab handouts for the circuits course.)

Designing courses to teach design—draft 2

This Friday, I have to give a lightning talk that boils down my thoughts on the circuits course to ten minutes, without slides, for a university faculty workshop being put on by the Academic Senate: “So you think your lecture course is better than a MOOC?” Friday, January 24th at 3:30 p.m. in the Stevenson Event Center.  I posted some notes for the talk last week.  Here is my current draft of the text—please give me some suggestions in the comments for improvement.  The ending seems particularly awkward to me, but I’m having trouble fixing it.

Designing Courses to Teach Design

I believe that the main value of a University education does not come from MOOCable mega-lecture courses, but from students working in their field and getting detailed feedback on that work. I’ll talk today about some courses I’ve created recently to teach students to do engineering design. These courses are high-contact, hands-on courses—the antithesis of MOOC courses.

Design starts from goals and constraints: “what problem are you trying to solve?” and “what resources are available?” So what were my goals and constraints?

The two problems I was trying to solve were in the bioengineering curriculum:

1. students weren’t getting enough engineering design practice (and what they were getting was mostly in the senior year, which is much too late) and
2. too many students were selecting the biomolecular concentration, where we were exceeding our capacity for senior capstone and senior thesis projects.  The other concentrations were under-enrolled.

The main constraints were that

1. there was no room in the curriculum for adding courses,
2. there were no resources for new lab space or equipment, and
3. all relevant engineering courses had huge prerequisite chains.

Furthermore, I would have to teach any new course myself, so the content had to be something I already knew or could learn quickly. Those constraints meant the new course would not have wet labs (though I encouraged wet-lab faculty to add design exercises to their existing courses).

My first partial solution was to replace the required EE circuits course with a new Applied Circuits course. The existing EE101 course is a theory class (mostly applied math) that prepares students to do design in later courses—but most bioengineering students never take those later courses, so were getting prepared for something they didn’t do. Due to “creeping prerequistism” in the 8 or 9 departments providing courses for the major, the bioengineering students were already taking far too many preparatory courses and far too few courses where they actually did things.

The goal of the new course was to have students design and build simple amplifiers to interface biosensors to computers. I chose a range of sensors from easy ones like thermistors, microphones, and phototransistors to more ones more difficult to interface like EKG electrodes and strain-gauge pressure sensors. I was not interested in cookbook, fill-in-the-blank labs—I wanted students to experience doing design in every lab, even the first one where they knew almost no electronics—and I wanted them to write detailed design reports on each lab.

The course was designed around the weekly design projects, not around preset topics that must be covered. Themes emerged only after the design projects were selected—the class comes back again and again to variations on voltage dividers and op amps with negative feedback.

Students used a free online textbook rather than buying one, but bought about $90 of tools and parts. I tried out every potential design exercise at home—rejecting some as too hard, some as too easy, and tweaking others until they seemed feasible. I designed and had fabricated three different printed circuit boards for the course (not counting two boards which I redesigned after testing the lab at home).  One of the PC boards is a prototyping board for students to solder their own amplifier designs for the pressure-sensor and EKG labs. (Pass boards around.)

Developing a hands-on course like this is not a trivial exercise. I spent about 6 months almost full time working on the course design (without course relief). I made over 100 blog posts about the design of the course before class even started (the URL is on the quarter-page handout, along with the URL for the course syllabus and lab assignments).

The course was prototyped last year as BME 194 “Group Tutorial” before being submitted to CEP for approval, and I wrote up notes after each class or lab (another 60 or so blog posts). Last year’s prototyping lead me to increase the lab time from 3 hours to 6 hours a week, which will mean rewriting all the lab handouts—splitting the material between the lab times and adding at-home or in-class design exercises between the two parts.

This course is expensive in terms of professor time: I’ll be teaching it next quarter for 2 sections with no TA, giving me 15 and a half hours a week of direct classroom and lab time (not counting office hours, grading, prep time, or rewriting the lab handouts). Just providing feedback on the 3–10-page weekly design reports will take another 10–20 hours.

The students taking Applied Circuits last year were mostly seniors who had been avoiding EE 101, rather than the sophomores I’d intended the class for. So the course did not provide early exposure to engineering design, nor did it direct more students to the bioelectronics concentration rather than the biomolecular one.

My second partial solution was to create a new freshman design seminar in conjunction with the student Biomedical Engineering Society. This course has no prereqs, is only 2 units, and does not count towards any major or campus requirements.

Unlike the Applied Circuits course, I didn’t choose the design projects for this course ahead of time, because I had no idea what skills and interests the students would bring to the class—I’ve not taught a freshman class in over a decade, having taught mainly seniors and grad students. I did try out 3 or 4 design projects on my own to gauge the skills needed to do them, but those projects all assumed some computer programming skills.

I’m prototyping the freshman design course this quarter as BME 94F and will be submitting course forms to CEP for approval at the end of the quarter. Once again, I’m blogging notes after each class meeting.

With no prereqs, I couldn’t assume that students had any relevant skills, though it turned out that all this year’s students had had biology, chemistry, and at least conceptual physics in high school. Only one student had ever done any computer programming, though—a big hole in California high school education—and only a few had any experience building anything. (AP physics classes were the most common exposure to building something.) On the first-day survey the students indicated an interest in learning some programming and electronics, so we’ll probably do something with an Arduino microcontroller board.

So far, I have been teaching generic design concepts using a photospectrometer as an example. The concepts include specifying design goals and constraints, dividing a problem into subproblems, interface specification, and iterative design. We’ll transition to applying these concepts to Arduino programming next week.

My third partial solution has been a complete overhaul of the bioengineering curriculum, which is currently before CEP for approval. No new courses were created for this overhaul, but all the concentrations were changed. For example, half the chemistry courses were removed from concentrations other than biomolecular, to make room for design courses in electronics, robotics, or computer science. And some the orphan math courses were removed from the biomolecular concentration to make room for more advanced biology. Long-term, I’m hoping to convince some of the departments to remove excessive prerequisites, so that students can take more interesting and useful courses before their senior year.

I could go on all afternoon about these courses and curriculum design, but I’m running out of  time, so I’ll leave you with these take-away messages:

1. The value of University education is in detailed feedback from professors in labs and on written reports, not in the lectures.
2. Students should be solving real problems with multiple solutions, not fill-in-the-blank or multiple-choice toy exercises.
3. These courses require a lot of time from the professors, and so are expensive to offer.
4. Failure to teach such courses, though, makes the University education no longer worthy of the name.

For those of you not present—the quarter-page handout will have the URLs for this blog’s table of contents pages for the circuits course and the freshman design course, in addition to the two class web pages:

• http://users.soe.ucsc.edu/~karplus/bme101/
• http://users.soe.ucsc.edu/~karplus/bme94f/

In addition to the quarter-page handout, I also plan to have copies of the prototyping board (both bare boards and ones that I used for testing out EKG or instrumentation amp circuits), one of the pressure sensors (on another PC board I designed), and the hysteresis oscillator boards.  If I can get it working on Friday, I may also wear the blinky EKG while I’m talking.

Preparing this talk has been weird for me—I can’t remember ever having scripted out a talk to this level of detail.  I usually spend many hours designing slides, and relying on the slides to trigger the appropriate talk.  Doing this short a talk without slides and without weeks to rehearse will probably require me to read the talk—something else I’ve never done.

Designing courses to teach design

Next week, I have to give a lightning talk that boils down my thoughts on the circuits course (202 posts) and the freshman design course (17 posts so far) to five minutes, without slides (maybe I’ll make one slide, with URLs for the course web pages and the blog posts). This is for a university faculty workshop being put on by the Academic Senate: “So you think your lecture course is better than a MOOC?” Friday, January 24th at 3:30 p.m. in the Stevenson Event Center.

I was going to spend this afternoon trying to come up with a catchy title for tomorrow’s deadline, but they moved up the deadline at the last minute, so I had to go with a rather clunky working title “Designing courses to teach design”.  When they announced it, they made it even clunkier: “Designing a course to teach design”, since they didn’t realize I had 2 courses to talk about, I guess.  (I checked—they changed it, I didn’t send it wrong.)

Note: I might get 10 minutes instead of 5 minutes, since they got only 6 speakers, not 10—I’ll have to check on that.  The speakers seem to be 1 from Physical and Biological Sciences, 1 from Social Sciences, 3 from Humanities, and one from Engineering:

• Susan Strome – “Bringing Biological Concepts to Life”
• Bruce Bridgeman – “Physiology vs. experience: Do you see what’s on your retina?”
• Jorge Hankamer – “A very interactive course”
• Dan Selden – “Teaching and Transference”
• Kevin Karplus – “Designing Courses to Teach Design”
• Kirsten Silva Gruesz – “Leading with Reading”

There don’t seem to be any speakers from Art.  Too bad, as I think that the Art faculty may have the most to say about how their courses can’t be MOOCified—maybe they just regard it as so obvious that there is nothing to say.

This post is my attempt to figure out what the key points are.  It is more in the nature of notes than a finished blog post, but I want to get it out, so that (1) I’m forced to think in concrete and not just vague ways about the talk and (2) those who have read some of my blog posts can give me suggestions on what they would like to hear in such a short talk.

• What were the problems I was trying to solve with the courses?
  1. Insufficient design practice for bioengineers, particularly in biomolecular concentration.  They were getting to the senior projects never having designed anything.
  2. Imbalance between different concentrations (too many in biomolecular, not enough in bioelectronics and “rehabilitation”).
  3. Too many preparatory courses before doing any engineering
• What constraints?
  1. No additions to number of required courses.
  2. No resources for new lab equipment, lab spaces, or TAs (so no wet lab design).
  3. I’d have to teach it myself (so no wet-lab design).
• Partial solution 1: replace EE circuits course with an applied circuits course.
  1. Although I’ve never taken a circuits course, I’ve taught myself enough to be able to teach applied electronics.
  2. Existing circuits course is math course, preparing students to take design courses later, and is not suitable as a terminal course, which is how most bioengineers were getting it.  Bioelectronics concentration still requires EE circuits course.
  3. Purpose of requiring electronics is so that students could interface sensors to computers—so that is the focus of the applied circuits course.
  4. Labs were designed first—what did I want the students to design?  Only afterwards were the EE concepts filled in to support those design tasks.
  5. I tested each lab repeatedly at home, to make sure I knew how to make the design work and what parts were likely to cause trouble.  Several initial lab designs were rejected as being too hard (and some for being too easy).
  6. Course was prototyped as a “Group Tutorial” before finalizing the course description for CEP approval.  Prototyping lead to changing the lab/lecture ratio: there are now 6 hours a week of labs and 3.5 of lecture (instead of 3 and 3.5).  With 2 lab sections this spring, I’ll have 15.5 contact hours a week (not counting office hours).
• Partial solution 2: Freshman design seminar
  1. Freshman course—no prereqs, so students have few shared skills.
  2. Not part of curriculum, so only 2-unit “overload” course (60 hours for course, including 22 hours for class)
  3. Lots of in-class work, both as individuals and in groups.  Group work to share skills, individual work to avoid “freeloading”.
  4. Couldn’t design labs ahead of time (didn’t know specific skills and interests of students).  Tried out several ideas anyway.
  5. Course being prototyped now as “Group Tutorial”.
  6. Need to teach design concepts explicitly:
     • Design Goals
     • Constraints on design
     • Dividing problem into subproblems (systems thinking)
     • Iterative design (modifying goals and constraints)
• Partial solution 3: complete overhaul of bioengineering curriculum
  1. Constrained by “creeping prerequistism”—all departments increasing the prereqs
  2. removing big swathes of science to make room for engineering
  3. Different science removed for the different concentrations

I think those are enough (probably too many) concepts for a 10-minute talk. I’ll probably have to cut to make it a 5-minute talk.

Readers: what concepts would you most want to hear about?  What essentials have I omitted? What fluff have I included?

My son’s first PC board

In Towards automatic measurement of conductivity of saline solution, I complained about not being able to use the KL25Z board, because my son was using it.  What he was doing with was building his first prototype for the light gloves project:

Here is his first PC board design, populated and mounted on the Freedom KL25Z board. The 5cm×5cm board (the cheap size from Iteadstudio) is a bit smaller than the KL25Z board is wide, so it only plugs in on one side (there is a screw acting as a spacer to keep it from being a cantilever). He has not yet mounted the Bluetooth module.

The prototype board has many differences from the final design: no battery, no battery charger, no buck/boost regulator, no flash memory, no processor, screw terminals instead of jacks—even the LED driver chip is different, since the chip he plans to use is only available as a surface-mount device. But there is enough of the design here to start demoing and writing code.  They are hoping to keep the final board below 5cm×5cm, so as to get low PC board prices even in very small production runs.  That will mean all surface-mount parts, so I think I’ll have to get a hot-air rework tool so that they can assemble a prototype—I’ve been thinking that I might want one for myself to play with surface mount designs, so this isn’t really a hardship.

My son still owes me some money for buying him the PC board run, the screw terminals, the Bluetooth module and some heat-shrink tubing. It is a bit annoying that he isn’t old enough to get his own Visa card, so that he can do his shopping without me as an intermediary. (We’re not talking big bucks here—we’ve spent more on pizza for him when they work through dinner than they’ve spent on all parts combined.)

I’m pleased that he got his first PC board working on the first attempt—he did the design entirely on his own, though he did ask my advice about things like via sizes and how fat to make the wires. Since there can be moderately high currents for the LED driver, I recommended that he make the ground and power lines as fat as he could, and he decided to do a flood for each. The board looks quite nice:

The top view of the board with the screw terminal to be mounted on the top and sides, the header on the lower left, and the Bluetooth module on lower right. The hole near the top right is for the screw that acts as a spacer.

This is what the glove looks like with the five RGB LEDs lit up (I understand that the final design will have more LEDs—but the through-hole driver chip has limited pinout). They don’t have the user interface written yet, so the lights were set up by a quick-and-dirty Python script talking to the KL25Z board over a USB cable (which is also supplying power).

They have not implemented programmable flashing yet, but the pulse-width modulation (PWM) frequency is set very low here (much lower than what they intend to use in the final design), so that one gets a stroboscopic effect even with steady light settings, just from the PWM. That’s not my son in the picture, but the high-school student who started the project—my son has done most of the electronics and programming, but did not originate the idea.

The two teens spent a big chunk of the day wiring up the LEDs and writing a small test program, as they want to demo the glove tomorrow for the back-to-school event. It may also be an enticement for teens to join an Arduino/microcontroller club—look at the cool stuff you can learn to make!

Another view of the prototype light glove in action.

Once they got the demo working, they invited over a third member of the team to do some brainstorming about what else needs to be done (and how they’ll do it). It looks like they’ll be talking half the night.

Since it is clear that my son will be spending a lot of time on this engineering project this year, we decided to make it part of his official school work.  In addition to the engineering design work, he’ll also do some a paper for his econ course (on pricing the components and manufacturing, and setting a retail price for the gloves), and papers for a tech writing course.

His first tech writing assignment is to write up a description of the color space he decided to use for representation of colors in the program, and why he chose that color space out of the dozens available.  He spent a week thinking about color spaces anyway, before settling on a commonly chosen one—so writing up that reasoning for the other members of his team will be a good writing exercise.