The project is developing learning materials and teaching strategies for a discovery-based, first-year electrical and computer engineering course. It is being designed to increase the retention and satisfaction of first-year students through hands-on, team-based projects that address real-world problems whose solutions benefit society. The students interact with an extensive partnership of diverse faculty members as they discover the importance of electrical and computer engineering problems and share in the excitement of their creative solutions. Signal and image processing for biomedical applications, power system reliability, and wireless sensor networks for environmental monitoring are examples of current problem areas used in the material. Faculty professional development activities and collaboration with community colleges are developing faculty expertise and disseminating educational innovations components. The project includes outreach activities to transfer the course to community colleges and to provide hands-on demonstration visits with community college and high school students, teachers, guidance counselors, and parents. Evaluation efforts, which are led by the College's resident evaluation expert, use student surveys, focus groups, and interviews to monitor the students' confidence and satisfaction; other surveys are being used to assess the effectiveness of the outreach and faculty development activities. The broader impacts include dissemination of the instructional material and learning strategies, special efforts to increase the recruitment, retention, and satisfaction of students in underrepresented groups, and outreach to the community college and high school communities.
