2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Troubleshooting skills are an important and integral part of good engineering practice. This skill represents the ability to identify and fix a problem within an engineered system in a time-constrained setting. However, such important engineering skills do not come to students naturally, and it has been a long-standing concern within the Electrical and Computer Engineering programs that most of our students did not gain strong troubleshooting skills by the time they graduated.
To address this issue, several faculty members in the Electrical and Computer Engineering programs have developed an initiative aimed at helping students develop and/or improve troubleshooting skills and, more importantly, build a solid foundation for successful professional careers in the future.
In the initial phase of this project, a troubleshooting laboratory activity was designed and implemented in Fall 2023 and Spring 2024 for Network Theory I, an introductory circuit course required for both Electrical and Computer Engineering students. During the troubleshooting activity, students worked in teams to identify and correct intentionally introduced errors in a constructed circuit. After identifying the errors, they were asked to correct them and then to demonstrate a fully functioning circuit through testing.
After the troubleshooting activity, students completed an anonymous questionnaire featuring multiple-choice and open-ended questions. The survey's objectives were to evaluate the lab's effectiveness, gather insights on how to improve it, and explore the possibility of extending similar troubleshooting activities to other courses. Although the students’ feedback collected from the two semesters has been positive and encouraging, indicating an initial success of the troubleshooting activity, additional iterations are needed to collect more data to achieve the survey’s objectives as well as to inform the development of an assessment strategy.