Java Applets enhance learning in a freshmen ECE course

Journal of Engineering Education, Oct 1998 by Graham, Charles R, Trick, Timothy N

Java Applets Enhance Learning in a Freshman ECE Course*

ABSTRACT

The goals of our work have been to enhance the learning environment of our students and to increase the productivity of faculty by freeing them from the drudgery of grading homework and quizzes, as well as the time required to record and compute grades. We have achieved these goals by means of the highly interactive World Wide Web (WWW)-based learning environment provided by MallardTM,1,2 and by the development of several Java applets3 within the Mallard environment to enhance the learning process. These Java applets are the subject of this paper. They include the ability to draw timing diagrams and graphs whose data points can be communicated to the server for grading. Java applets have also been written to simulate a simple microprocessor, and a whiteboard has been implemented as an applet for synchronous communication with on-line tutors. We also present some interesting student survey results on Mallard and Web-based instruction.

I. INTRODUCTION

Two of the goals for our ECE110 freshman engineering course" are to excite students about studying electrical and computer engineering and to expose them early in their education to all of the basic topics taught as part of the electrical and computer engineering curriculum. It is a lecture/laboratory course in which students learn about electrical instruments, motors, generators, diodes, transistors, amplifiers, digital circuits, and the microprocessor. In the laboratory the students experiment with various modules containing these devices, and in the final weeks of the laboratory they design a robotic vehicle. The enrollment in the course has grown steadily to several hundred students per semester, and it is still growing as more non-majors elect this course over the traditional circuit analysis course. This places a heavy burden on staffing. The prior work of Burks Oakley II reported in reference 5 demonstrated that asynchronous learning technologies can be an effective solution to this problem. His software was platform dependent. With the rapid advances occurring in the WWW and browsers and with the promise of platform independent software, we concluded, as did others, that the WWW has great potential as an asynchronous learning environment.

In the 1996 Spring Semester we made the decision to abandon textbook-assigned problems, which were manually graded by a teaching assistant (TA), and move to the highly interactive WWW-based learning environment. Our goal was to relieve the instructors and their assistants of mundane tasks and to create an interactive environment in which the student receives immediate feedback and assistance. There are many approaches to using multimedia and the WWW to support asynchronous learning. At the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Mike Swafford and Donna Brown were developing Mallard,lz a WWW-based asynchronous learning environment. Mallard provides an asynchronous learning environment in which students can view interactive tutorials and take personalized on-line quizzes. Mallard grades quizzes submitted by the students and gives them immediate feedback about their solutions. Mallard also provides a number of useful features to help instructors maintain class rosters, post important announcements, keep track of student grades and progress, and develop appropriate teaching materials for their courses. Since its inception in the Fall Semester of 1995, Mallard has now been used by thousands of students in a dozen different courses. Courses that have used Mallard at the University of Illinois include courses in electrical and computer engineering, Italian, and economics.

In our freshman course the students do all of their homework on-line and don't submit any homework on paper for manual grading. Instead, the students submit their homework to the Mallard server. Within seconds after submission a student receives his/her grade. If a student does not receive 100%, the student can be given additional feedback with clues about how to correct the problem. The student can also be given the opportunity to resubmit the problem a limited number of times with or without penalty. Hints can also be made available after an answer is submitted to guide the student towards the correct solution. The student's grade and number of attempts are recorded on a secure server. Cheating is less of a problem with Mallard than with textbook assigned problems, because problems and problem parameters can be randomized. Also, the homework is only weighted as 10% of the grade; the other 90% of the grade consists of traditional in-class examinations and performance in the laboratory.

For the 1996 Spring Semester the question types in Mallard were constrained to multiple choice, numerical, or simple symbolic answers. Sometimes we were too confined in the types of questions that we could ask the students. Yet the grading of more complex question types can put too much of a load on the server and can slow the response time unacceptably for the hundreds of students who are on line. We found Java applets to be a solution. By means of Java applets students can draw a timing diagram in the browser window or draw a piecewise linear waveform on the screen. After the student has finished drawing the timing diagram or graph, the applet communicates the solution to the Mallard server, which grades the problem and gives the student feedback about his/her solution.