Principal Investigator: Euzeli dos Santos, Assistant Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Purdue School of Engineering and Technology, IUPUI
Project Title: Blended Presentation Approach (BPA) Promoting Curriculum Enhancement of ECE Power Electronics
Funding Level: $2,700
Abstract:
The ECE Power Electronics (ECE 427) course is a three-credit course offered by the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, IUPUI. To solve the problem of students’ lack of practical experience in the ECE 427, this project will propose a teaching principle called Blended Presentation Approach (BPA). The ultimate goal of BPA is to improve student understanding and performance by providing a tool that enables the ECE 427 professor to give practical demonstrations of theoretical concepts. There are two specific goals in this project. While the first one is to provide engineering students with exposure to the types of challenges that they would face in the power industry, the second goal is to better prepare undergraduate students for advanced courses, such as Advanced Power Electronics Course (ECE 595). The rationale is that the traditional presentation followed by a practical demonstration in the classroom with a dedicated hardware will motivate and benefit the students enrolled in this course. The main characteristic that differentiates the BPA from the current way classes are taught in other universities is that there is no time gap between the theoretical presentation and the experiments performed for validation purposes. Another unique characteristic is that this learning process creates an ever-present assisted experiment, providing an incentive and motivation for the students in that course to learn. The portable experimental setup (dedicated hardware) and handout with ten experiments employed in the BPA approach will be developed during the 2015 summer.
