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Atoms, Bits, Circuits
and Systems
By Jana Moore
Nanotechnology. Robotics. Photonics. MEMS. Power
grids. Stochastic processes. The fields encompassed by
the Department of Electrical and Systems Engineering
(ESE) have become so broad and complex that even
professionals find keeping up difficult.
Freshmen could easily feel overwhelmed by the
scope and breadth of ESE, until last fall, when the
Department took the rare step of offering ESE 111:
Atoms, Bits, Circuits and Systems (ABCs), a class
proposed and partially designed by senior Kevin
Conley and his fellow Teaching Assistants (TAs).
“To get excited about the fields in ESE, it’s important
that freshmen get hands-on work and a flavor of the
different things you can do, and no one course gave
them that,” says Nick Howarth, one of the seven TAs
who made an impassioned plea for the new overview
class a year ago. Daniel Lee, professor of Electrical and
Systems Engineering, had an additional goal: “I wanted
them to see how they could change the world after
understanding the underlying theories.”
A New Kind of Intro Class
Lee and Siddharth Deliwala, Undergraduate Lab
Manager, decided the lectures needed to take a far
different tack from traditional introductory courses.
“Instead of just teaching an overview, we wanted
to utilize energetic and engaging guest speakers,”
Deliwala says. “We focused on particular discrete
areas as representative of entire subjects.”
Lee addressed a wide spectrum of topics during
lectures, from mathematical models of circuits and
semiconductor physics and processing techniques
to abstractions and analysis of large-scale systems.
Guest speakers examined the application of
microelectronics outside of computing, the potential
of nanoparticles and the complexities of power grids.
For the midterm, the students analyzed the Apple vs.
Samsung touch-screen lawsuit from an engineering
and technological perspective.
Hands-on at a High Level
The labs, primarily designed by Howarth and fellow TA
Sam Wolfson, roughly matched the focus of the lectures
while introducing a variety of concepts, some of which
are normally reserved for juniors. The first lab began
with simple circuits but ended with MATLAB, powerful
software used to analyze and plot large data sets
and control complicated experimental setups. Later,
the students learned how to program the Arduino,
an inexpensive open-source microcontroller platform
popular worldwide.
The use of sensors, LCDs, accelerometers, data
acquisition, signal processing and wireless communication
followed, along with constructing a portable
USB charger. All the labs built up to the final project,
designing and building a networked pedometer
that interfaced with MATLAB and was capable of
sharing data with users.
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