Work in Progress: Hands-on Exploration of the "Big Ideas" in Electric Circuits

Although extremely computer literate, today\´s engineering students don\´t enter college with the same level of hands-on "tinkering" with hardware that prior generations exhibited. Gone are the days when students were ham radio operators, played with Erector sets and had tinkered extensively with electronic kits or simply taken things apart. As a result, students have less "gut intuition" than prior generations possessed when entering the job market. Lab experimentation provides a sense of where things deviate from theory, offering the opportunity to explore non-ideal conditions; while also giving students the chance to play with hardware and gain the experience that helps them support their subsequent design courses. Hands-on, intellectually engaging studio course delivery was a revolutionary idea that has improved the quality of education at Rensselaer over the past 12 years and has since been adopted, in various forms, by many other universities. Yet even with more engaging studio environments, student learning is still impeded by space constraints, insufficient time for laboratory activities (particularly to do the in-depth probing that leads to an intuitive feel for system design) and poorly designed equipment that takes up a great deal of space. Furthermore, the equipment sets can\´t be brought home for individual study, thus limiting the time for hands-on exploration that students need to grasp the "big ideas" in engineering