2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Teaching communication systems presents a persistent challenge in bridging theoretical concepts with intuitive understanding. Students often find it difficult to visualize and internalize the abstract principles that underlie modern communication links such as modulation, signal constellations, bit error rate curves, RF propagation and interferer modeling. In particular, these topics often rely heavily on mathematical abstraction and frequency-domain analysis, which can obscure their physical meaning for learners encountering them for the first time. Without opportunities to interactively explore how signals are generated, transmitted, distorted, and recovered, students may find it challenging to connect theoretical derivations to the observable behavior of real communication systems. As a result, misconceptions can persist, and intuition about system performance under varying conditions such as noise, interference, or bandwidth constraints remain underdeveloped.

To address this pedagogical challenge, the Radio Frequency Simulations for Education and Exploration (RFSEE) was developed as an interactive educational tool designed to enhance conceptual learning in a junior level communications course. This abstract introduces the use of the program RFSEE as a teaching tool in ECE3614 Introduction to Communication Systems. Previous experience has demonstrated to the RFSEE team that students have a hard time intuiting communications concepts without visual aids. RFSEE is a collection of simulations meant to supply students with the intuition needed to conceptualize key aspects of communication links. These include simulations of constellation diagrams, baseband communication links, and more. RFSEE has already been integrated in its beta form into Spring 2025 running of the class with 48 students. From the previous offering of the course RFSEE team has collected feedback from students to improve RFSEE for future offerings of the course. Current results suggest that the simulations provide students with basic intuition about key concepts and help identify areas for targeted improvement during the semester. Students reported using the beta version of RFSEE to assist with homework and studying for tests.

The RFSEE team hopes to report on the findings from the 2025 Fall semester where the simulations are integrated into the course curriculum. The team will use feedback from students participating in a focus group in the 2025 Spring semester and 2025 Fall semester to report on qualitative results of RFSEE’s ability to assist learning. This paper will include data from the 2025 Spring and Fall semesters. The team will compare results of using RFSEE in the classroom to other simulators inside and outside of the material covered in ECE3614.

The RFSEE team employed focus groups with willing student participants. The team will focus on if and how students used the simulations in their own time. Preliminary results indicate that students are using the simulations to bolster their understanding while doing homework. Further, students found that the tool was helpful for other projects, including senior design projects. This paper is particularly relevant to the EE division based on its ability to test new learning strategies with creative uses of technology for learning wireless sensor networks.