Date: 5/10/12 Wrapup session for the Electrical and Computer Engineering Departments Present: Jamie, Ryan, Pradeep, Jeff, Jerry, Vagos, Doug (Sec. Pro Temp) Jeff: EG32 (2 sections, 44 students) All were good at doing the work. There was one bad student. Grades were B..B- This will be dropped to a one term course next year. Some really good projects this term. Students learned a lot. ME's built a ckt. EE221, AC Circuits: Students built active crossovers. 13 students of which 3 or 4 did not put out the effort this year (health issues and no excuse). Used an new venture (ping live) to take attendance in class. Am still grading the class. Pradeep EE331 Analog Ckt design II. Had 8 students, bimodal distribution. Some were not motivated. Class went pretty well. Used a new book since last fall (book covers 231 and 331 to simplify lectures and present more solved examples in the class). This worked better, we have a new design, rather than a study project. A design problem was selected from the book. Did analysis, simulation and lab results. Students worked together well and the work was better. Used to give take home exams. Now final is all in class. This was a big success. We are going to do more design projects in the future. Grading is not yet done, but is soon will be. This term, we did monte carlo analysis, so now there is probability in the course. Outcomes in probability are in the project reports. We need someone to demo pSpice. Ryan will fill in for pradeep. Ryan: I am on sabbaticle. I mentored the senior design project Glider; and indep research project (based in the nasa space grant). This is a portable bone density monitor. ESS had a nice trip to the natalus trip. Jamie: CR246: Dig. Design II; First time teaching. (12 students) Crash course in VHDL and then DD concepts. Projects were given that built the concepts into the course. Block diagrams were given as specs and the students had to implement them. Sometimes there was a little reverse engineering. Students did not always compile their code. 50% did not bother to compile their code. Exam: Midterm exam; it was too easy! Grades were higher than I expected. We did a final project; grades were A to D, but mostly B- or above. Final projects: Impressed. One student build a slot machine controller. One group did a coke machine: FSM with a read out and input was quarters dimes and nickes. Another group did a scoreboard for baseball. Outs were counted, as well as balls and strikes. The LCD display driver was used. Data path and pipelining was taught with bussing. We will go over this in more detail. The guest lecture on NIOS was well recieved; Vagos: EG392 Senior project II; Had 6 EE and 1 CpE, The CpE was very good. Some of the EE's were not that good. One of them took a leadership role and really started to shine. We now have a handbook that was used as a standard. The next edition of the handbook, the engineering standards. CpE: KR: Works at UBS; BG: works at NASDAQ. 100% placement on Computer Engineering. Jerry Sergent: ECE480, Wirelss Systems 8 students ECE 475 Micro wave structr 7 students ECE490, Analog Communications 5 students We had great enthus. for the courses. In ECE480, all 8 students got a 100 on the midterm. I must have done a great job on the midterm. We wanted a second course on microwave courses in the summer,but could not get enough for the summer. Doug: CR346 and CR331 and ECE420. CR331: Biomedical Signal Processing; we did k-means clustering and pat rec. We need to make MA351 a pre-req for this course, as students are not necessarily fresh in this area. The probability is in the final, along with histogram analysis. Students compared pat reg based systems (hist. patterns vs. kmeans clustering). ECE420:One student did a brain computer interface to a microcontroller. We have a nice thesis proposal. The student took the class late and will now graduate. CR346: Computer Architecture, we built PCBs this term. But the PCBs came in on the last day of the term It took a month...but the boards looked great, silk screens, cut, drilled holes, plated through, 2 sided. Perfect registration. I am told that for $10 students can get their boards faster, which is a great idea. Had one student not show for the final. They faxed it in without prior permission. And the fax was blank. And they asked for an extension 2:20 before the final...and they asked for a different final 6 hours before the final was due. And they did not return my phone calls....or e-mails. Their grade suffered as a result.