Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1093246
16 DESIGN007 MAGAZINE I MARCH 2019 Spivey: We rely heavily on industry input to help us decide what tooling and equipment to teach. Industry professionals are very knowl- edgeable on new trends and when it is appro- priate for me to upgrade or alter my courses. One challenge I've had with people from the industry over the years is the idea that we need to teach the students more about what- ever their particular specialty happens to be. I generally respond, "No, you need to do that." I find that industry professionals often forget how little we all knew when we were under - grads. Most of these students didn't know Ohm's law two years ago. They are learning how to design. We are trying to teach them foundational skills as well as the ability to think well. This is why I focus so heavily on project-based experiences. One of the beautiful things about the project- based experience is that you learn while you're doing as opposed to learning how to get through the assignment. The focus isn't the details of crosstalk as much as it is the understanding of how to process and apply new information. When you encounter crosstalk in your design and have to fix it, that lesson—as well as the thinking process or debugging it—stays with you for a very long time. If you understand how to think in the context of PCBs and elec- tronics, you can learn crosstalk pretty quickly. Johnson: What I'm hearing you say about getting industry involved is making sure that experience professionals are aware that under- grad EEs are fundamentally learning how to think. Spivey: The first three years in EE are pretty standard. Students cover signals, microelec- tronics, microprocessors, EMAG, etc. But in their senior year, it's generally all elective; there's not really a particular, required class. And I used to wonder, "If nothing is funda- mentally required, why are we doing it?" After those first three years, students have the foun- dational skill set to be an EE. However, their thinking process is still weak. Before we let them go, we want them to take some more courses of their choice and learn to take those fundamental skills and apply them in differ- ent areas. That extra year is not an accident; it has evolved over time as we consider how to educate engineers. We need that fourth year of seasoning to get them thinking deeply. Shaughnessy: It sounds like students are get- ting a good cross-section of experiences at GFU with EEs actually learning about PCB design. Spivey: Right. The way we view it, we have freshmen come in and learn how to use a machine shop because you need to know how to build something; it's the same for EEs beyond all of the technical career stuff. You should know how to make a board. I think it's irresponsible to graduate engineers who can't build a board; that just seems odd to me. It is so readily available and easy to do, and it is such a powerful building block for so many problems, so why would we not empower stu- dents with this skill set? Shaughnessy: Are you noticing changing atti- tudes of students when they come in? Have you had to change your teaching style over the last 10 years to "click" with the students? Spivey: It's a little more difficult for us because we've gone from 50 to 300 students, and there has been a pretty drastic change in how we interact with that number. We have also changed our curriculum over the years. It used to be a common first two years for everybody, One of the beautiful things about the project-based experience is that you learn while you're doing as opposed to learning how to get through the assignment.