1. Joel Voldman Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Keywords:
EECS curriculum
Online learning for residential students
Hands-on learning
Integrating hands-on activities with online education to improve residential education
Joel Voldman
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

2. Why? What problem are you solving?
How can we leverage advances in online learning to improve residential education?
How can we best combine hands-on learning with online learning?
What are your educational objectives?
Introduce students to topics Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS)
Combine programming with hands-on hardware exploration
Show how design challenges can be solved using a combination of hardware and software
Introduce open-ended design to 1st-2nd-yr curriculum

3. When? What is the developmental history of your innovation?
Spring : Co-developed 6.03 (Intro to EECS via medical devices), which teaches Matlab programming, Fourier analysis, and machine learning in the context of ECG, glucose sensing, and MRI using MITx
Fall : Taught 6.01 (Intro to EECS via robots), which teaches Python programming, controls, circuits, probabilistic thinking, and AI/algorithms in context of robots using CAT-SOOP
Spring 16-now: Co-developed 6.S08 (Intro to EECS via IoT), which teaches C/C++/Python programming, microcontrollers, and algorithms in context of the Internet of Things using CAT-SOOP

4. Where? Have you tried this in other institutions?
No, but ideas and infrastructure should be transferrable
Is this developed for a single class, a full course, or a curriculum?
Single class, though the mixture of online + hands-on is propagating throughout the curriculum

5. What? What learning activities and materials have you developed?
Complete class with lectures, psets, labs
What is your theory of change?
Time- and staff-intensive hands-on education is enabled by off-loading routine work to online
What has worked really well?
Open-ended design is success!
Long hands-on labs and auto-graded homework exercises
Teaching 2 programming
languages simultaneously
Internet-connected fridge
IoT skateboard

6. Prognosis? How are you documenting impact?
Web, videos, talks
How do you plan to scale-up?
Linearly with staff. This is a challenge due to our large enrollments.
What challenges are you currently facing?
How to automatically determine correctness of open-ended design solutions. Can we exploit connectedness of IoT systems?
How to encourage students to solve problems with a mix of hardware and software (and not just software)
What advice would you like from others at FOEE?
Other experiences with
1st-2nd-yr design
Online + hands-on learning
Introducing topics around EECS