During the 5-week Summer Engineering Institute, incoming
electrical engineering majors from primarily fourth and fifth quintile high
schools took ECE5: Making, Breaking and Hacking Stuff. The class is held in the
EnVision Arts and Engineering Maker Studio and is part of the University of
California San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering’s Experience Engineering
Initiative, aimed at giving every engineering and computer science
undergraduate student a hands-on or experiential engineering course or lab each
and every year – starting freshman year.
The course is normally offered during the school year and is
10 weeks long. Students participating in the Summer Engineering Institute
completed the course in just 5 weeks by meeting twice as often, with the
advantage of a much smaller class size.
The final project in the course required students to program
a robot to recognize the difference between black and white so that it could
follow a black line drawn on white paper. Some of the teams incorporated
other features from their previous projects while other teams tried new
sensors.
“Our students are building things and breaking them down to
make them better,” said Truong Nguyen, Chair of the Electrical and Computer
Engineering Department. “That’s the goal of the hands-on curriculum – it’s
open-ended so as to allow the students to discover how to make things better.”
“We adjusted the accuracy of tracking using sensors that
tell the robot where it is in relation to the line,” said one student, whose
robot veered off the track and spun in a circle.
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