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Engineering Classrooms and Studios

A 70 student studio room for delivery of Core Engineering courses.

Photos

The Core Studio is a 70 student studio room in use since the spring of 1999. It is used to deliver multidisciplinary engineering courses in the studio format. Two courses presently use this facility, Embedded Control (a.k.a. LITEC) and Introduction to the HC11 Microcontroller. Embedded Control is taken by most of the engineering students. The Intro. to the Microcontroller course is taken by Information Technology students. The combined enrollment is about 700 students per year.

These courses use the studio format, which combines lectures, recitations, and laboratory exercises all in one room. This format eliminates large lectures of 200 students or more. A typical studio session involves several short lectures, separated by in-class activities. These activities (paper problems, computer simulations, software code development, or circuit construction) are highly interactive with the professor and as many as 4 teaching assistants circulating among the student teams, offering help and discussion. The computers are used for modeling, data analysis, interactive tutorials, running applications and as a source of reference material.

The Core Studio is therefore unique in that it has:

1. the capability to present lectures
2. computers with applications and links to information
3. experimental equipment specific to the courses offered
4. sufficient space to allow the instructors to walk among the student teams
5. a capacity of 70 students

Both Embedded Control and the Intro. to the HC11 Microcontroller courses have the students develop a project with an embedded microcontroller. The computers in the studio are integral to the projects in several ways. They are used to write, edit, compile, and download the code for the microcontrollers. They are also used to debug the software, display and analyze the project performance, and to write the lab reports. In addition, there is an extensive set of interactive tutorials that have been developed to provide the students with background information. The tutorials were developed on MAC computers and are being converted to be web-based. This work in progress can be viewed at: http://litec.rpi.edu/. (Follow the link to the Tutorials to get a feel for the course material. Follow the link to the Invitational, and then the photos to see the room in use.)

Two servers
42 450MHZ Pentium II systems

Gary Gabriele
Paul Schoch
Richard Smith
David Torrey
Debbie Kaminski
Michael Jensen
Amir Hirsa
Lee Ostrander
Mark Embrechts