"Learning by Doing, a Method to Engage Underrepresented Minority Students Learning Electrical Circuits"

Basic electrical circuit analysis is always perceived to be a hard-to-comprehend course for most undergraduate electrical engineering students, especially those from underrepresented minority groups.To help those students gain a strong fundamental understanding of basic electrical circuit theory, a learning-by-doing approach was designed for students who have recently taken a basic electrical circuit course.Funded by a NASA CIPAIR (Curriculum Improvements and Partnership Award for the Integration of Research) grant, four underrepresented minority (i.e., 3 Hispanic and 1 Pacific Islander) students from a community college were recruited to design, assemble, and test a printed-circuit-board (PCB) based circuit in the summer of 2013.The circuit is capable of taking in power at 1.6 KHz with a very low voltage level (~200mV) and converts it to 5 V DC power to power-up biomedical implants wirelessly.First, the students were asked to run the circuit simulator (i.e., LT-spice) to optimize the existing previously designed circuit.Then, they designed their own board and assembled the components.In the end, they thoroughly characterized the circuit that they put together.In the ten-week period, the students went over the complete board-level circuit development flow: from the design to the test.Their understandings of electrical circuit theory was dramatically improved as manifested in their project report and final presentation.The feedback from the students demonstrates that the NASA CIPAIR is an effective method to engage underrepresented minority students to learn electrical circuit theory with the learning-by-doing method.