Infusing a Series of Motor Lab Exercises and Projects into the Freshman Circuits Course

The "Introduction to Electrical Engineering Technology," commonly referred to as the Freshman Circuits Course, is a comprehensive program encompassing three modules-Electrical Circuits, Microcontroller Applications, and Digital Circuits.Developed ten years ago, the original function of the 4.5-hour lecture-lab course presented in two sessions per week, each one for 2hourse and 15 minutes long, was to introduce freshman students to the subject of EET by focusing on the early portions of the sophomore year DC circuits course at a relaxed pace.Another purpose was to have freshmen connect with EET faculty before their sophomore year.In recent semesters, we've seen greater numbers of freshmen lacking general tooling experience and being unprepared in basic math, and in response, we've added more hands-on exercises and projects and included more practical algebra-based word problems.This past year, we incorporated a servo motor lab sequence in one of the course sections and a DC motor sequence in the other section.This paper focuses on a plan to infuse a broad series of motor-based labs and projects into the Freshman Circuits Course, aiming to increase interest and motivation by demonstrating that some very understandable and easily modified Arduino code can control different aspects of motor action (Arduino software application was developed with coding simplicity in mind).We hope that adding these lab exercises, where students can modify the code and view corresponding changes in motor operation, will inspire students to progress through our program.And help bridge the gap between theoretical knowledge and real-world applications.The motors selected for exploration include DC motors, servo motors, and the planned integration of stepper motors.The paper outlines the course design, specific lectures, labs for each motor type, and course evaluation methodologies and concludes with insights drawn from the ongoing improvement efforts.