Practical skills and design: A maker course for ECE students

摘要

This paper describes a sophomore-level ECE course that bridges the gap between the maker movement and typical engineering design courses. This course incorporates the practical skills of fabrication, assembly, and hardware integration found in makerspaces but deepens the perspective from one of getting it to work to designing it to work well and efficiently. This paper discusses mastery-based education in practical skills, an open-ended student-defined design project, and a logistics model that incorporates support staff as partners in the course. The relationship between this course and an ECE-themed makerspace is also discussed.