Premier Courseware of 2003

Electronics Curriculum and WSDOT-Pavement Guide Interactive were announced as the Premier Courseware of 2003 at the 2003 ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference on Friday, November 7, 2003 in Boulder, CO.

Electronics Curriculum

Don Millard, Gerald Burnham and Dianna Newman, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

The Learning Modules for an Electronics Curriculum are an integrated set of courseware designed to supplement electronics instruction. Electronics Curriculum includes twenty-four interactive learning modules and utilizes two novel educational technologies (Scribe and Web Team). This courseware provides a comprehensive set of examples and interactive problems for introductory electronics classes that may be easily used as a set or as stand-alone modules. The key innovations of this courseware, the Scribe and Web Team technologies, greatly enhance the use of these materials as tools for students to gain understanding of basic concepts in a hands-on manner at home and in collaboration with classmates. A great strength of the approach used in Electronics Curriculum is that it augments the instructor’s ability to discern and address students’ key conceptual blocks and to monitor student performance, especially when used in the Scribe and Web Team environments.

WSDOT-Pavement Guide Interactive

Stephen Muench and Joe Mahoney, University of Washington and Linda Pierce, Washington State Department of Transportation

The WSDOT-Pavement Guide Interactive is a resource and information intensive site that provides an excellent self-directed instructional environment addressing pavement knowledge. While the site is self-described as a virtual “encyclopedia” of pavement knowledge, the site design transcends mere information exchange through the provision of a well-constructed instructional framework. The site’s organizational design encompasses a series of pavement related modules, each with extensive content, instructional media, in-depth resources and user self-assessment. Structurally, the site is well organized, easy to navigate, and aesthetically appealing. WSDOT-Pavement Guide Interactive makes strong use of various types of media including text and graphics, video and simulation, and ensures that they are conceptually well integrated.

Finalist Candidate

J-DSP

Andreas Spanias, Arizona State University

J-DSP is “labware” that enables students to perform online simulations and computer experiments in Digital Signal Processing (DSP) courses over the Internet. J-DSP provides a user-friendly graphical user interface to enable students to establish and run educational DSP simulations, such as, digital filter design, signal analysis, speech signal processing, FFT-based spectral analysis, etc. In addition, J-DSP enables applications in courses such as communications, image processing and controls. The J-DSP interface enables visual programming of DSP tasks on a Java-enabled web browser. J-DSP provides a powerful, easy-to-use, compact environment for educational simulations that complements commercially available software packages.

2003 Sponsors

About the Premier Award

The Premier Award for Excellence in Engineering Education Courseware was developed by NEEDS—A Digital Library for Engineering Education, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., and the Synthesis Coalition to recognize high-quality, non-commercial courseware designed to enhance engineering education.