In this project, coalition of faculty from three universities has developed a new laboratory for signals and systems courses for Electrical and Computer Engineering majors. This laboratory significantly improves signals and systems education by having students design and implement systems that solve real engineering problems. Required signals and systems courses are very important to electrical and computer engineering majors because they provide the foundation for important subjects such as communications, systems, control, and signal processing. Unfortunately, these courses do not have laboratories or hands-on activity associated with them. However, it is very important to have today's engineering students "do" real engineering problems because they are motivated best by work that they readily appreciate as relevant and useful. This project builds a laboratory for introductory signals and systems courses, which has students design and implement solutions to real engineering problems. They test their designs on their own speech and music waveforms and listen to the results. The laboratory is built around computer simulation software and data conversion hardware using high-performance personal computers. Problems are assigned as homework projects without formal laboratory meetings, therefore avoiding difficult curriculum changes. Students in this new laboratory focus on solving real system design problems with the concepts, mathematical descriptions and block diagrams that are the tools of a signals and systems course. Audio output helps them connect the frequency domain to reality by associating the spectrum analyzer of their ears with what they see from output plots.
