Work in progress — Music synthesizers: A tool in engineering education

To improve the rates of retention in all academic programs NYIT created the Office of Academic Support and Retention Services (OoASRS). In spite of this initiative, the rate of freshman-related retention in the School of Engineering and Computing Sciences (SoECS) has not improved significantly. Contextual Teaching and Learning (CLT) is a concept of instruction that relates subject matter content to the real world and motivates students to make connections between knowledge and it applications. To improve retention rates the faculty of the SoECS requires all freshmen to take ETCS 105 “Career Discovery”. The course uses the educational philosophy and strategies of CLT to enable students to find “meaningfulness” in their education and offers a place for meaning and content to merge. Last semester, we developed a new 8-week CLT module for this course which used a modular music synthesizer to introduce freshmen to an extremely wide range of engineering concepts in an engaging way. This “Work in Progress” will describe the module´s lessons and provide a preliminary assessment of student engagement and retention rates..