In this paper, the authors focus their attention on the way magnetic circuits and permanent magnets are usually treated in most textbooks and electrical engineering courses. This paper demonstrates how this important topic is too often presented simplistically. This simplistic treatment does not allow the students to develop a complete…

The computer science classes in China's institutions of higher education often have large numbers of students. In addition, many institutions offer "blended" classes that include both on-campus and online students. These large blended classrooms have long suffered from a lack of interactivity. Many online classes simply provide recorded instructor…

This paper reports the integration of supplementary training in academic literacy, for those without the assumed entry standard, into a standard electrical engineering program without compromising any other educational objectives. All students who commenced an engineering degree were tested as part of their first session's assessment activities.…

Game-based assignments typically form an integral component of computer programming courses. The effectiveness of the assignments in motivating students to carry out repetitive programming tasks is somewhat limited since their outcomes are invariably limited to a simple win or loss scenario. Accordingly, this paper develops a simulation…

Educational institutions pay careful attention to the design of program curricula, which represent a framework to meet institutional goals and missions. Of course, the success of any institution depends highly on the quality of its program curriculum. The development of such a curriculum and, more importantly, the evaluation of its quality are…

This paper details a successful and inexpensive implementation of a remote laboratory into a distance control systems course using readily available hardware and software. The physical experiment consists of a beach ball and a dc blower; the control objective is to make the height of the aerodynamically levitated beach ball track a reference…

Problem-based learning has been at the core of significant developments in engineering education in recent years. This term refers to any learning environment in which the problem drives the learning, because it is posed in such a way that students realize they need to acquire new knowledge before the problem can be solved. This paper presents the…

This paper discusses the situation in a 3-phase motor or any other 3-phase system operating under unbalanced operating conditions caused by an open fault in an inverter switch. A dc voltage source is assumed as the input to the inverter, and under faulty conditions of the inverter switch, the actual voltage applied between the line to neutral…

This paper presents a new environment for teaching practical work in AI subjects. The main purpose of this environment is to make AI techniques more appealing to students and to facilitate the use of the toolkits which are currently widely used in research and development. This new environment has a toolkit for developing and executing agents,…

In this paper, a pedagogical software for the design and analysis of loudspeaker systems is presented, with emphasis on training students in the interaction between system parameters. Loudspeakers are complex electromechanical system, whose behavior is neither intuitive nor easy to understand by inexperienced students. Although commercial…

Studying fundamental Computer Architecture and Organization topics requires a significant amount of practical work if students are to acquire a good grasp of the theoretical concepts presented in classroom lectures or textbooks. The use of simulators is commonly adopted in order to reach this objective. However, as most of the available…

Distributed wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are being proposed for various applications including defense, security, and smart stages. The introduction of hardware wireless sensors in a signal processing education setting can serve as a paradigm for data acquisition, collaborative signal processing, or simply as a platform for obtaining,…

This paper describes a one-credit laboratory course for freshmen majoring in electrical and computer engineering (ECE). The course is motivational in nature and exposes the students to a wide range of areas of electrical and computer engineering. The authors believe it is important to give freshmen a broad perspective of what ECE is all about, and…

Kirchhoff's laws are usually considered as electrical current and voltage properties. Nevertheless, they are sometimes applied to nonelectrical systems. One way to increase their efficacy and range of applicability would be to show Kirchhoff's laws, and the properties deriving from them, as being independent of any physical system as far as…

Over the last few years, most of the attempts to introduce active learning methodologies in the classroom have made use of Information and Communication Technology (ICT). Many of these efforts have been directed to collaborative scenarios used in remote, blended or face-to-face experiences, in order to take advantage of the flexibility provided by…