Curriculum Committee Minutes 2021 April 12

Attending

Anu Agarwal, Arijit Banerjee, Yuliy Baryshnikov, Mark Hasegawa-Johnson, Ravi Iyer, Volodymyr Kindratenko, Erhan Kudeki, Kiril Levchenko, Andrew Miller, Sayan Mitra, Shaloo Rakheja, Alex Schwing, Jonathan Schuh, Victoria Shao, Ilan Shomorony

Time and Place

Monday, April 12, 4:00pm, https://illinois.zoom.us/j/96972752638?pwd=Z3hqdUxYamNJazNYRkR0V1JmM0padz09

New Business

1. Proposal for a temporary course in fall 2021, ECE 398AA: Building Systems Using Microcontroller Controlled IO.  This will be the first offering of this course. Course proposal.doc, Syllabus ECE398V7.doc, Updates398.docx.

Comments from a committee member  who can't attend:

1. This sentence doesn’t read correctly to me: “In addition to leveraging on their knowledge of C language acquired through ECE 110, 120, 210 and 220, to program a microcontroller to control external sensors and actuators, the students will gain hardware knowledge (including PCB design) to integrate the peripherals to the MCU.” It seems to imply that ECE110 and 210 teach C programming. I assume they meant to mention the circuits aspects of these two courses.
2. This 398 course is an advanced and structured version of what occurs in the ECE 110/120 James Scholar projects. The students who finished James Scholar projects in their freshman year define a great pool of students to recruit for the initial offering of this ECE398.
3. I like the proposal and am in favor of this course although I will not be there to vote.

STATUS

Friendly amendment: This course satisfies the requirement of an ECE undergraduate hardware lab.

Note: as the course is taught, instructors will take note of student abilities to consider whether it should be 200-level or 300-level in its next offering.

STATUS: Passes, 15-0-0