Board 84: A Teamwork-based Electrical & Computer Engineering Introductory Lab Course

Ying Lin; Todd D. Morton; Steven Christopher Schoeneck

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Conference: 2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition
Location: Portland, Oregon
Publication Date: June 23, 2024
Start Date: June 23, 2024
End Date: July 12, 2024
Conference Session: Electrical and Computer Engineering Division (ECE) Poster Session
Tagged Division: Electrical and Computer Engineering Division (ECE)
Permanent URL: https://strategy.asee.org/48384

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Paper Authors

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Ying Lin Western Washington University

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Ying Lin has been with the faculty of the Engineering and Design Department at Western Washington University since September 2010 after she taught for two years at SUNY, New Platz. She received her BS, MS, and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and MS in Applied Statistics.

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Todd D. Morton Western Washington University

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Todd Morton has been teaching the upper level embedded systems and senior project courses for Western Washington University's Electronics Engineering Technology(EET) program for 25 years. He has been the EET program coordinator since 2005 and also served

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Steven Christopher Schoeneck Western Washington University

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In 2020 I left the US Navy to pursue my Bachelors of Science in Electrical and Computer Engineering. Throughout my time in the Navy I worked in collaborative team environments, filled with diverse individuals, with the goal of accomplishing specific tasks to accomplish our mission. When I left and began my education at Western Washington University, I found myself surrounded by individuals who wanted nothing more than to succeed. It was only a matter of time before my cohort realized we are stronger together than we are apart. The curriculum gave us opportunities to work together as a team, and we quickly learned that everyone brought their own strengths to the table. Working with others, asking questions and being actively involved has always made a huge impact on my ability to learn.

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Abstract

The Engineering Accreditation Commission of ABET requires engineering programs such as Electrical and Computer (ECE) engineering programs to demonstrate the attainment of required student outcomes (SO) that prepare students for their professional careers after graduation. Among these, teamwork, as an important element, is highlighted in SO 5 as “an ability to function effectively on a team whose members together provide leadership, create a collaborative and inclusive environment, establish goals, plan tasks, and meet objectives”. It is thus paramount for ECE programs to include teamwork-related content and training in the curriculum and implement a process to assess the attainment of SO 5. In our ECE program, teamwork has been introduced to students in the curriculum as early as in the first-year freshman-level ECE introductory lab course. Moreover, measures and assessment data from this introductory class along with data from several higher-level ECE courses have been used to gauge the attainment of SO 5. The assessment results from this introductory class serve as a useful baseline and reference for understanding the trend of SO 5 attainment across different year groups of students ranging from freshmen to seniors.

In this paper, we will present some successful efforts in achieving the following goals: teaching teamwork principles, fostering a positive teamwork culture, and training teamwork practices in the Intro to ECE lab course, a first-year freshman-level hands-on class. In this course, students participate in a series of hands-on lab assignments and a 4-week long course project in teams of two or three members. To facilitate achieving the aforementioned goals, we have designed the course material and adjusted the lecture pace to better align with the project schedule, and also created a series of effective teamwork activities that not only enhance students’ teamwork experience but also help teams to complete the project on time. In the full paper, we will elaborate on these teamwork activities and evaluate their effectiveness based on students’ feedback.

Student survey results from recent offerings of this course have been very positive and suggest that the teamwork-related teaching endeavors we have introduced in this introductory course have been successful and effective in promoting students’ teamwork experience. To effectively assess SO 5, the survey questions have been deliberately chosen or modified based on a set of popular industry-adopted teamwork survey questions. In this paper, we will also provide details of the measures and data collected from this course and the criteria adopted to assess the attainment of SO 5. Assessment results from recent course evaluations will be shared in the full paper as well. We feel that some of our teaching practices in this course could be adapted to other EE or ECE programs to meet similar needs.

Citation
Format

Lin, Y., & Morton, T. D., & Schoeneck, S. C. (2024, June), Board 84: A Teamwork-based Electrical & Computer Engineering Introductory Lab Course Paper presented at 2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Portland, Oregon. https://strategy.asee.org/48384

TY  - CPAPER
AB  - The Engineering Accreditation Commission of ABET requires engineering programs such as Electrical and Computer (ECE) engineering programs to demonstrate the attainment of required student outcomes (SO) that prepare students for their professional careers after graduation. Among these, teamwork, as an important element, is highlighted in SO 5 as “an ability to function effectively on a team whose members together provide leadership, create a collaborative and inclusive environment, establish goals, plan tasks, and meet objectives”. It is thus paramount for ECE programs to include teamwork-related content and training in the curriculum and implement a process to assess the attainment of SO 5. In our ECE program, teamwork has been introduced to students in the curriculum as early as in the first-year freshman-level ECE introductory lab course. Moreover, measures and assessment data from this introductory class along with data from several higher-level ECE courses have been used to gauge the attainment of SO 5. The assessment results from this introductory class serve as a useful baseline and reference for understanding the trend of SO 5 attainment across different year groups of students ranging from freshmen to seniors.

In this paper, we will present some successful efforts in achieving the following goals: teaching teamwork principles, fostering a positive teamwork culture, and training teamwork practices in the Intro to ECE lab course, a first-year freshman-level hands-on class.  In this course, students participate in a series of hands-on lab assignments and a 4-week long course project in teams of two or three members. To facilitate achieving the aforementioned goals, we have designed the course material and adjusted the lecture pace to better align with the project schedule, and also created a series of effective teamwork activities that not only enhance students’ teamwork experience but also help teams to complete the project on time. In the full paper, we will elaborate on these teamwork activities and evaluate their effectiveness based on students’ feedback.

Student survey results from recent offerings of this course have been very positive and suggest that the teamwork-related teaching endeavors we have introduced in this introductory course have been successful and effective in promoting students’ teamwork experience. To effectively assess SO 5, the survey questions have been deliberately chosen or modified based on a set of popular industry-adopted teamwork survey questions. 
In this paper, we will also provide details of the measures and data collected from this course and the criteria adopted to assess the attainment of SO 5. Assessment results from recent course evaluations will be shared in the full paper as well. We feel that some of our teaching practices in this course could be adapted to other EE or ECE programs to meet similar needs. 


AU  - Ying Lin
AU  - Todd D. Morton
AU  - Steven Christopher Schoeneck
CY  - Portland, Oregon
DA  - 2024/06/23
PB  - ASEE Conferences
TI  - Board 84: A Teamwork-based Electrical & Computer Engineering Introductory Lab Course 
UR  - https://strategy.asee.org/48384
ER  -