The design portion of a second term freshman course, ‘Introduction to Engineering II’, provides an overview of each of the disciplines within the College, and a representative, discipline-specific design lab. With only 2 hours of pre-lab lecture/preparation, and 3 hours in-lab time, providing the necessary theory and completing a meaningful lab is extremely challenging when the fundamental discipline-specific knowledge is still very limited. This Electrical Engineering lab requires students to modify a program to implement a microcontroller-based combination lock. It simulates a hotel room door lock, except that it uses a key pad instead of a swiped card. This paper investigates the design of the lab, its implementation, and feedback results.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.