2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

BYOE: Teaching and Assessing Troubleshooting Strategies in Circuits Courses

Presented at ELOS Technical Session 6: BYOE (Bring Your Own Experiment): Engaging Students with Creative Hands-on Laboratory Experiences

BYOE: This paper details two breadboard-based laboratory experiments designed to teach and assess students’ use of troubleshooting strategies. Troubleshooting strategies allow engineers to methodically identify and repair faults in systems. Example strategies include: split-half or isolation, which involves testing intermediate system points to identify which sub-system is causing a fault; tracing or topographic search, which involves following the flow of the system typically from the starting or end point until you identify the fault location; and using domain knowledge to model or assess the system. Expert troubleshooters generally use both domain expertise and knowledge of troubleshooting strategies.
While troubleshooting strategies are broadly relevant across engineering disciplines, they are rarely explicitly taught. Introducing these strategies explicitly into a curriculum can ensure more equal instruction than relying on “inevitable” errors as teaching tools during lab. Explicit lessons on troubleshooting can also help develop metacognitive strategies for students to help transfer knowledge between disciplines.

This paper presents two experiments designed to teach troubleshooting strategies to electrical and computer engineering students. Both require only the use of basic circuit hardware, including a breadboard, a power supply, an oscilloscope, and components such as op-amps and resistors. The first, which we call “telephone troubleshooting” requires teams of three students. Each team assembles a circuit, verifies that it works, purposefully breaks the circuit in whatever way they decide, and then swaps broken circuits with another team. Each team then begins troubleshooting, with one student deciding what measurements to make on the circuit without being able to see the circuit, the second student making the measurements, and the third student recording the interaction so the team can reflect on the process afterward.

The second troubleshooting experiment involves teaching assistants building two circuits for pairs of students, with the same fault introduced in every circuit. Students are then paired up and observe each other troubleshooting the given circuit. We present two simple circuits that elicit specific troubleshooting strategies that are designed for a quick instructional activity near the start of a circuits or electronics course and one circuit design that is more complicated and better suited for the end of such a course, possibly as an assessment. We also present the corresponding observation worksheet that encourages metacognition of the troubleshooting process.

This paper discusses in more detail the set-up of both troubleshooting exercises, practical notes on running the exercises in classes ranging from 40 to 100 students, and suggestions for how to collect and analyze the resulting data for instructional purposes.

Authors

Dr. Caroline Crockett University of Virginia [biography]

Caroline Crockett is an assistant professor at the University of Virginia in the Electrical and Computer Engineering department. She received her PhD degree from the University of Michigan in electrical engineering. Her research interests include image processing, conceptual understanding, and troubleshooting.
Mr. Adam Barnes University of Virginia [biography]

Adam Barnes graduated with a BS and MS in Electrical Engineering from Virginia Tech. He worked in small business and industry for 18 years before returning to Virginia Tech to teach engineering as a professor of practice. He then moved to Charlottesville and began teaching at the University of Virginia in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, where he has now been for 5 years.
Dr. George Prpich http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2697-2276 University of Virginia [biography]

Professional Skills and Safety are my main pedagogical interests. I use the Chemical Engineering laboratory to implement safety training to improve safety culture, and to adapt assessment methods to enhance development of students’ professional skills. I am an Assistant Professor of Chemical Engineering at the University of Virginia and I hold a B.Sc. (University of Saskatchewan) and Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering (Queen’s University). Complimenting my pedagogical research is an interest in bioprocess engineering, environmental engineering, environmental risk management, and I have authored >40 peer reviewed publications in these fields. I’m also active in developing workforce development initiatives, specifically within the biopharmaceutical manufacturing space. Beyond academia, I have 7+ years of international consulting experience working with the U.K. government, European Union, and the United Nations.
Dr. Anne Marguerite McAlister http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4155-251X University of Virginia [biography]

Dr. Anne M. McAlister is an Assistant Professor in the First Year Engineering Center at the University of Virginia. She has her PhD in Education and MS in Systems Engineering from the University of Virginia, and her BS in Chemical Engineering from The Ohio State University. Her research focuses primarily on identity and qualitative research methods.

Note

The full paper will be available to logged in and registered conference attendees once the conference starts on June 22, 2025, and to all visitors after the conference ends on June 25, 2025

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