UCSC CE Department's fulfillment of the Major Design Experience

We leave as a historical artifact this document showing how we explicitely monitored the major design experience.  Currently, we monitor the MDE as part of Objectives a-k.

Students must be prepared for engineering practice through the curriculum culminating in a major design experience based on the knowledge and skills acquired in earlier course work and incorporating engineering standards and realistic constraints that include most of the following considerations: economic; environmental; sustainability; manufacturability; ethical; health and safety; social; and political.

These courses provide a major design experience:

1. CE123 via all skills and exercises
2. CE/EE123A via all skills and exercises
3. CE/EE123B via all skills and exercises
4. CE125 via all skills, topics, and exercises
5. CE126 via all skills, topics, and exercises
6. CE155 via Skills 1 and 2
7. CS116 via Core Lab Exercise 1
8. EE126 via all skills and core topics
9. EE127 via all skills and core topics
10. EE128 via all skills and core topics

In the following section, representatives from each department talk about how their students fulfill this component, how it is monitored, and what the feedback loops are.

1. The CE department on monitoring and feedback
   1. The initial take (as written by Anujan Varma)
      Sound design practice in computer engineering involves several critical elements:
      1. Creating designs to meet a given set of objectives and constraints, some of which may not be known at the outset, or may be specified incompletely.
      2. Understanding the tradeoffs in alternative design choices
      3. Documenting and presenting the design in oral and written forms.
      4. Collaborating with others working on the same project
      5. Paying attention to a variety of considerations, including cost; manufacturability; environmental, safety, ethical, etc.
      While elements of this process are taught in courses throughout the CE curriculum, the capstone courses (CMPE 123, CMPE 126 and CMPE 155), as well as the Verilog-based design class (CMPE 125), integrate all these to provide a complete design experience for the student. In addition, these courses also offer the student the experience of working in a team on a substantial design effort. The courses require the students to work indepedently with guidance from the instructor, starting from a project description until the completion and demonstration of the project and its associated documentation. Periodic reviews are conducted to track the progress of each team and provide feedback. By enforcing Technical Writing for Computer Engineers (CMPE 185) as a pre-requisite, students are given the opportunity to practice their writing skills in the production of project documentation. The quality of the class is further controlled by enforcing the core exam requirement.

      The success of this outcome is tested in the short term by the student evaluations performed by the course instructor. These evaluations cover the result of the project as well as the steps taken to reach the result (design tradeoffs evaluated, changes made in response to specific considerations, etc.). The effectiveness is measured in the long term by the CE Portfolio requirement and exit and alumni surveys.

   2. Final metric and feedback as determined by the Oversight committee

      Our three metrics are:

      1. Quantitative:123B: 100% of CE students pass this class on the first try.
      2. Quantitative:The Senior Portfolio: Students passing 123b receive an average of 4 out of 5 on the Major Design Experience component of the Senior Portfolio evaluation.
      If either of these is not met, the oversight committee must propose changes to the faculty and the advisory counsil.
2. The EE department's monitoring and feedback (as written by Ken Pedrotti)
   The electrical engineering department tests this component by evaluation of the student performance within the capstone design courses (short term), student evaluations of the design courses (short term), exit survey of graduating seniors (medium term), and finally via the alumni survey (long term).