Engineering Lower Division Laboratory MaterialsFaculty at West Virginia University, University of Wisconsin - Platteville, and Colorado School of Mines are addressing the criticism of engineering education that it is weak in design, and while producing engineers who excel at analysis, lack skills in design, synthesis and evaluation. Many educators propose changes in curricula and instructional methods aimed to integrate these skills back into the learning experience. While many innovations have merit and work well for their developers, educators elsewhere often experience difficulty incorporating them into their particular environment. The faculty are developing lower-division electrical engineering design oriented laboratory materials and plan to evaluate their effectiveness in three very different curricular environments. A student booklet of laboratory design exercises and an accompanying instructor's manual describing in detail how to conduct a design-oriented laboratory is being developed from the most broadly successful draft materials. The materials transform the laboratory from the relatively passive intellectual experience of verifying well established theories to an active intellectual experience creating functional devices, circuits, and systems. The student materials are heavily supported by extensive aids for the instructor, and all materials are designed for and evaluated within disparate curricular structures to make them broadly useful.
