2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

It is often difficult for students to find interest or value in a first course on electric circuits. Students outside the field of electrical engineering may also experience greater difficulty. This course, primarily for aerospace and mechanical engineering majors, focuses on exposing students to basic circuit methods and terminology to prepare them for future courses and career in industry. The current dilemma professors experience while teaching these courses is providing relevant coursework while also improving class engagement. We propose using the Question Formulation Technique (QFT) coupled with simple research projects in our circuits course to incite curiosity and develop questions. QFT developed by the Right Question Institute was introduced into the curriculum in the form of a semester long project. QFT engages students to develop their own personalized questions for research as opposed to classes that rely on the instructor simply assigning questions or topics for research. QTF focuses on the students developing an essential – yet often overlooked – lifelong learning skill of asking and creating good questions. The goals of this proposal are to generate curiosity and elicit connections for students on subjects they may have less exposure in and further develop students' soft skills. The project consisted of five prompts periodically spread out over the course in the form of an in-class activity. The students formed groups of 3-5 and generated questions that would then turn into an out-of-class assignment focusing on diving deeper into one of the questions created. The shorter assignments required students to do small amounts of outside research and write a paragraph about their chosen question. The students would then choose one of these paragraphs to turn into a larger essay for their final project assignment. For our initial assessment of the efficacy of our proposal, we are conducting a survey of students’ experiences and responses to the QFT prompts. Initial findings show that the project helped broaden the students’ knowledge of topics that are not particularly covered in depth, and they were able to discover connections between circuits and their other coursework.