Page 25 - CSLA_AnnualPublication

INSPIRING INNOVATION THROUGH INVENTIVE TEACHING TECHNIQUESNew interactive teaching platforms engage students in the learning process and emulate the collaborative workplace.To be competitive in today’s dynamic high-tech industries, engineers, computer scientists, and technology professionals have to be more creative, collaborative, and adaptable than ever before. To better prepare students to meet the evolving needs of the engineering profession, professors at California State University, Los Angeles, are incorporating new teaching tools, pedagogies, and practices that leverage collaboration, hands-on learning, and novel instructional designs to create a student-centered learning environment.Several years ago, Nancy Warter-Perez and Jane Dong, both professors of electrical and computer engineering, receiveda National Science Foundation Course, Curriculum, and Laboratory Improvement (CCLI) grant. The grant provided an opportunity to redesign the Introduction to Digital Engineering course in order to enhance students’ interest in engineering by exposing them to hands-on, in-class projects.“The redesigned course has been a big success,” says Dong. “The students are motivated by working on a real ield pro- grammable gate array (FPGA) board. They start with a simple design exercise and move up to more complicated projects step by step. By the end of the quarter, they gain enough skills to design and implement a 4-bit binary calculator.”Warter-Perez adds, “We’ve observed that students are much more engaged in class and better prepared for subsequent courses, and students have indicated that they are more interested in engineering after taking this course.”Their collaborative project-based learning (CPBL) model includes interactive lectures, engaging in-class inquiry and design activities, opportunities for collaborative learning and relection to stimulate deep learning, and real-time assessment to measure students’ understanding. The in-class design projects reinforce fundamental course concepts and progressively teach students about design tools and processes. CPBL has been integrated into multiple courses across the curriculum. As students move into the upper level courses, the projects are more extensive and more of the time spent workingon these projects is outside the classroom.Dong is currently conducting research into the effective- ness of the CPBL model, and exploring ways to design an effective instructional system using CPBL for a broad range of courses in engineering.Continued on page 24InSights | 23