This project will create a first-year introductory electronics course for science and pre-engineering students. The course will concentrate on analog techniques, with a slant towards practical electronics for the sciences. We will use computer-automated data acquisition and control systems as instructional tools. Each lab station will include a protoboard interfaced through an I/O board and a GPIB DMM to a computer workstation running instructional software that we have written in LabVIEW. The students will build the circuits and use LabVIEW software to explore, test and control them. Computer-based data acquisition and control are used as tools to teach electronics, not as the focus of the course itself. Through the use of computer-based instruction, the students will be freed of much of the tedium associated with traditional electronics courses and will be able to focus on the material. In addition, we find that by integrating LabVIEW into this electronics course, we are opening up new approaches to teaching the material. This pre-calculus electronics course is offered it at a level that makes it available to most incoming students. This approach provides students with a positive laboratory experience and one-on-one contact with regular faculty members early in their career. This will get them started towards early research experience and better prepare them for industrial internships.
