Minutes of the 2010-11 ECE Curriculum Committee
October 12, 2010
Present: Tangul Basar, Choquette, Hu, Jones, Kudeki, Leburton, Lumetta, Makela, Mitra
Erhan Kudeki chaired this meeting.
The committee approved, with minor changes, two ECE 498 course proposals: (i) Extending Mobile Computing Through Cloud Computing by Yih-Chun Hu and Constantine Polychronopolous, and (ii) Engineering Software Systems by Steve Lumetta. Steve Lumetta will need to also submit a request for a permanent version of his course soon.
The committee then discussed the content and organization of ECE 190 and 290. One question raised was whether ECE 190 could be streamlined by having a less comprehensive coverage of LC3 while still maintaining a simple discussions of machine language and assembly language codes and their relation to high level programming. Another topic discussed was whether programming and gate level implementation issues could be covered in a tightly coordinated and orchestrated versions of revised ECE 190 and 290.
A consensus from this meeting was that, rather than taking a purely top-down or purely bottom-approach to teaching the material, a preferred approach would consist of several cycles of going back and forth between the bottom and top levels (in a "just in time" fashion) over the two course sequence.
The discussion will continue in the next meeting.