{"id":144,"date":"2017-07-26T14:46:03","date_gmt":"2017-07-26T18:46:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/elligoudzwaard.com\/?p=144"},"modified":"2018-02-15T14:58:24","modified_gmt":"2018-02-15T19:58:24","slug":"engineering-for-learning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/elligoudzwaard.com\/index.php\/2017\/07\/26\/engineering-for-learning\/","title":{"rendered":"Engineered for Learning"},"content":{"rendered":"
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When\u00a0Associate Professor Eric Hansen<\/a>\u00a0began teaching electrical engineering at Thayer in the early 1980s, the tech world was regaling the debut of the personal computer and the intricate microprocessors\u2013developed by electrical engineers\u2013that made them possible.<\/p>\n<\/section>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Photo\u00a0by thowi\/\u00a0CC BY-NC-ND 2.0<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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With the arrival of programmable components in the 1990s, engineers could\u00a0fit more functionality into a tiny package, and they began to use code, rather than primitive equations, to capture elaborate designs. Smaller, faster, cheaper was the name of the game, following a long-term trend known as Moore’s Law. Through these successive waves of technology change, students in Hansen\u2019s Digital Electronics course,\u00a0ENGS 31<\/a>, have learned how to manipulate bits\u2014the tiny units of data that tell computers what to do\u2014into the building blocks of everything digital.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/section>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Driven by this constant evolution in technology, Hansen says he has \u201cmelted down and recast\u201d his Digital Electronics course every five years or so in order to keep pace with the new processes, methods, and materials that have emerged. But until recently, the design and delivery of his course had remained relatively constant: in-class lecture, weekly lab, final exam, big design project. While this is a fairly standard approach to teaching in the STEM disciplines, Hansen began to notice over time that he wasn\u2019t getting the results he was hoping for.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was pretty clear that 90% of the learning in the course was happening in the lab,\u201d Hansen says, \u201cAnd I was always unhappy that we couldn\u2019t bring more building into the classroom.\u201d In engineering, like other applied sciences, opportunities to engage actively with the process\u2014in this case, a design process of ideation, implementation, and testing, in cyclical fashion\u2014often helps to cement more theoretical learning for students.<\/p>\n

But it wasn\u2019t until Hansen witnessed colleague\u00a0Peter Robbie<\/a>\u00a0teaching his classes differently that he realized he could change things up. \u201cHe treated his classroom like an art studio,\u201d says Hansen of Robbie. \u201cI thought, ‘why couldn\u2019t I do that?'”<\/p>\n

So two years ago, Hansen experimented with reserving one class meeting each week for design exercises. Students gathered during x-hour at whiteboards in Thayer’s Couch Project Lab to work in groups of four.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe x-hour became a time where I could interact with students as they were solving problems,\u201d Hansen explains. As he moved among the students, giving guidance where needed and thinking through questions with them as they worked through the design process\u2013ideation, implementation, testing\u2013Hansen began to see the possibilities.<\/p>\n

At the time, though, the opportunity for hands-on learning was limited by lab time and space, and by the expense of using costly components and materials, like silicon, for students to try their hands at building. The vision of students being able to experiment, make adjustments to their designs, and iterate quickly\u00a0seemed still out of reach.<\/p>\n

Assistant Professor Geoff Luke<\/a>, who joined as a second instructor on the course around this time, explains, \u201cThere were logistical issues to making it work. Without access to lab space, we had to figure out how to build components in the regular classroom. And with 60 students, one instructor couldn\u2019t give feedback to everyone. We needed more facilitative resources.\u201d<\/p>\n

And to fulfill the vision completely, Luke and Hansen needed more technology. Specifically, they needed\u00a0EDA Playground<\/a>, a software tool that allows students to build in simulation rather than silicon, and provides instant feedback and faster turnaround time on designs. When they secured access to the software for their students last fall, and with the help of DCAL\u2019s Gateway initiative, the two professors set to work redesigning the course to accommodate this new capability.<\/p>\n

Through Gateway, Hansen and Luke worked with instructional designer and engineering professor\u00a0Petra Bonfert-Taylor<\/a>\u00a0on backward course design, and incorporated\u00a0Learning Fellows<\/a>, undergraduates who had taken the class previously, to provide in-class assistance and facilitation. In order to make time in the class period for more hands-on practice, the team realized they\u2019d need to shift much of the content delivery, which had traditionally been done through in-class lecture, elsewhere.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe started by asking, \u2018What do we want students to get out of this class?\u2019\u201d says Hansen. \u201cThen we refined our learning objectives to emphasize the important parts, and looked at which content we could offload into videos.\u201d<\/p>\n

Recording video lectures for students to watch outside of class is a common strategy, often called\u00a0\u201cflipping the classroom,\u201d<\/a>\u00a0used to free up class time for other types of learning. Over the course of the fall and winter, Hansen and Luke recorded a dozen or so videos each, and developed classroom exercises for students to apply the concepts from the videos. Luke taught the redesigned course for the first time in spring 2017, and Hansen followed with an offering this summer.<\/p>\n

Of the first run, Luke says, \u201cIt was tough at first developing relevant exercises that were at the right level, and provided enough background information.” But, he says, he noticed at the end of term that the students\u2019 final projects were better designed than in previous terms, and the students reported overwhelmingly that they appreciated the videos and exercises in their course evaluations. Hansen\u2019s experience this summer has been similar.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen the example clicks and the exercise works, it\u2019s great,\u201d he says. \u201cIt can be really fun to teach this way\u2013talking with students, seeing what they\u2019re working on, getting to know them.\u201d But, he says, the adjustment has not been entirely seamless. He\u2019s still working at adapting his former lectures into relevant handouts, and as the in-class problems increase in complexity, he\u2019s trying to strike the right balance between content delivery and hands-on practice.<\/p>\n

Luke concurs, and points to the Learning Fellows and the students themselves as ready sources of in-the-moment feedback on how the course is going, which allows him to adjust in real time. He says he\u2019s already looking ahead to next year, when he hopes to iterate on his own design and eliminate the exercises that didn\u2019t work. \u201cTeaching this way allows you to really see the learning happen,\u201d he says. \u201cI\u2019m getting very tangible feedback about what is and is not working. It\u2019s a much shorter feedback loop than I\u2019ve had previously.”<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s really valuable,\u201d agrees Hansen, who also notes the value of receiving feedback from the Learning Fellows and instructional designer during their weekly teaching huddles, a kind of postmortem\u00a0on what’s working well and what needs improvement in the class.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe whole flow of the class hour is different, and I\u2019m trying to get that right,\u201d Hansen says. “But leapfrogging the class [by teaching in consecutive terms with Luke] has allowed us to iterate much more quickly. It has been a real learning experience.”<\/p>\n

As the field of digital technology continues to evolve, and students at Thayer continue to develop their understanding through experimentation, so too do Luke and Hansen. True to form, they are applying that same engineering design process\u2013ideation, implementation, and testing\u2014to iterate on their work as teachers in pursuit of a well-crafted learning experience for students.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n