2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

A sophomore-level introductory Linear Circuits course is a graduation requirement for multiple engineering majors at California State University, Chico. Historically, over 50% of students registered each semester have declared Mechanical Engineering majors. These students must also take two upper-division courses with a Linear Circuits prerequisite, but many don’t consider the course content relevant or useful and exhibit low interest and motivation. Previously, all lab assignments only involved verification of principles such as Kirchhoff’s Laws by breadboarding circuits and making measurements with multimeters and oscilloscopes. No opportunity for design or implementation of practical applications was offered, and students who already saw the course as boring and irrelevant had no reason to change their minds after completion.

Starting with the Fall 2018 semester, four new lab assignments were created to give students experience in designing circuits to meet performance criteria and building a working system. Since students still needed to learn how to breadboard circuits and use lab equipment, no changes were made to labs during the first half of the semester. The last four labs involved the design and implementation of an operational amplifier-based infrared security system with automatic day and night modes. An additional change for the Fall 2019 semester was the adoption of the portable Analog Devices ADALM2000 (M2k) Active Learning Module which includes DC power supplies, a waveform generator, and an oscilloscope.

Assessment of the applications-based lab assignment update was implemented by conducting Likert-scale student opinion surveys at both the beginning and end of the Fall 2019 semester. Start-of-semester surveys given to 104 students gathered feedback on how relevant and applicable the course content was to their majors (Question #1), their level of interest (Question #2), and motivation to study (Question #3). The same questions gathered feedback from the remaining 91 students at the end of the semester, except Question #2 was modified to ask about the change in their level of interest in course content after completing the security system.

Analysis of results of both surveys showed no statistically significant changes occurring across all majors for Question #1. For Question #2, statistical analysis was not performed because the response options were also changed, but 81.3% of students who completed the end-of-semester survey indicated that their level of interest in course topics had increased when compared to the beginning of the semester. However, analysis of Question #3 showed a statistically significant decrease in the motivation of Mechanical Engineering students to study more advanced topics related to Linear Circuits, with no significant change among other majors. Even though 64.7% of Mechanical Engineering students indicated that their level of interest increased, the difficult and abstract nature of circuit analysis likely limits their interests in further study to concepts only.

Most of the positive feedback regarding use of the ADALM2000 module was centered around students’ ability to work on lab assignments and other projects on their own time. However, the acquisition cost of the module ($99 in Fall 2019) was a source of negative feedback.