Overview

As stated in the Bulletin: “Freshman introductory course for students interested in electrical engineering. Students learn the design process, problem-solving, teamwork and presentation skills through completion of a hands-on project. Lab activities familiarize students with basic equipment and components. Speakers present an overview of different fields and career opportunities in electrical engineering. Weekly lab.”

ECE 101 is a starting point any student interested in finding out more about electrical and computer engineering fields. Some may be unsure whether this is for them or not; others may be certain of it but not have appropriate background. We will help them discover these and other things in this course through some fun but also rigorous activities. The main point of the course is not to weed out students but to motivate them for further study.

A more formal course description can be found here:

https://www.pdx.edu/electrical-computer-engineering/ece-101

Course structure:

• Lectures

• Homework

• Labs

• Projects

• Exams

Emphasis is on labs and projects.

Required TA Skills

• You need a solid background in engineering problem solving.

• You should be familiar with instrumentation in circuits labs: oscilloscopes, signal generators, power supplies.

• You should know how to solve basic DC circuit problems and how to implement them on breadboards.

• Having a good background in MATLAB fundamentals and programming is required. If you are not fully fluent in MATLAB, you should have at least a good background in a related language such as C/C++ and be able to bring yourself up to speed on MATLAB quickly.

• You need to be comfortable talking to and working with students on both an individual and group basis.

• You need to be able to guide student teams in their project planning; knowing tools like Trello is a plus.

TA Responsibilities

ECE 101 teaching assistants are required to:

1. Attend labs during the term. Each week, the TA is responsible for two 3-hour lab sections (total = 6 hours/week).

2. Prepare for each lab session by doing the experiments. This can be done before the start of the term. Verify that any special parts or instruments are available and ready for use.

3. Deliver a 10 to 15 minutes long introduction at the beginning of each lab.

4. Help students during each lab session and grade their submitted lab reports. There may be an undergraduate student assistant to help with the labs.

5. Keep lab attendance data.

6. Grade homework sets. Most of them require scoring traditional engineering analysis problems.

7. Upload student scores and feedback to D2L.

8. Monitor student progress on their project by checking their Trello boards and providing feedback.

9. Hold office hours for 2 hours per week.

Lab sessions (weekly):

1. Ohm’s law

2. Series and parallel circuits, using sensors

3. DC motors

4. Time-varying signals

5. Sinusoids

6. Robotic arm, trigonometry, MATLAB

7. Digital circuits

8. Introduction to LabJack DAQ

Projects:

1. Individual project on describing one area of electrical or computer engineering (these reports are typically graded by an outside grader)

2. First team project, such as making their own two-piece robotic arm (reports are typically graded by outside grader)

3. Second team project: design and build a Rube-Goldberg machine or project of their own. (reports are typically graded by outside grader)