2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Addresses call for papers bullet: “Laboratory development and innovation”

Most engineering students take a course in electric circuits. In a typical circuit laboratory, the focus is on discrete passive components: resistors, inductors, and capacitors. These components do not convert any energy into a form that can be sensed by the human senses. The function of the circuit can only be probed with the instrumentation. In this study, we explore the effect of adding a transducer: the loudspeaker. The control group of students construct a high-pass filter with a discrete resistor and capacitor.The experiment group use a loudspeaker instead of a resistor. Both groups perform a frequency sweep to see the transfer function of the filter. The frequency of the signal manifests itself as the pitch of the sound from the speaker, and them magnitude manifests as the sound volume. Through a short survey instrument, we investigate how the additional information present in the sound produced by the loudspeaker affects student understanding of high pass and low pass systems.