Innovative interactive media for electrical engineering education

Abstract

The techniques used to educate future electrical engineers need to integrate innovative teaching approaches with today's technology in order to reach and motivate the diverse groups (students, faculty, professionals) that will be involved. This paper provides an overview of the work in progress to create, demonstrate, and implement web-based interactive learning modules (ILMs) and educational multimedia technologies that are being produced under a NSF-CCLI grant at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. These technologies operate within a browser environment and include: a means to capture, review and process a student's actions while using a interactive learning module (Scribe); a technology that allows for interactive, collaborative exploration, design and testing across the Internet (WebTeam); and the ability to provide Internet access to instrumented experimentation and data gathering using an inexpensive microcontroller board (LongLab).