2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Lower-division undergraduate education in electrical engineering plays a pivotal role in shaping students’ technical identity, confidence, and persistence in the major. To strengthen early engagement and skill development, our project is implementing a transformative curriculum that introduces a new sequence of three courses—Introduction to Electrical Engineering and Clinics of Electrical Engineering I and II. These courses emphasize hands-on learning with industrial and research-relevant tools such as PLCs, LabVIEW, and MATLAB, along with foundational analog and digital measurement and design. By ensuring that students take at least one major-related course each semester, the initiative promotes a stronger sense of belonging, makes students ready for theoretical learning, and fosters early engineering identity formation through skills and knowledge.
Building upon this foundation, the curriculum provides structural support and technical growth for the four-year degree program in electrical engineering, enabling a gradual and cohesive development of design thinking and system integration skills rather than delaying them to upper-division years. In the second year of the project, we are developing the course material and including emerging technology projects such as cyber-physical systems, cloud-based design, and data-driven automation to expose students to modern engineering paradigms early in their studies. This Top-Down-Top educational approach introduces students to simplified forms of system-level design in their first two years, preparing them for advanced design challenges and interdisciplinary problem-solving later in the program. The proposed curriculum transformation exemplifies how rethinking the early engineering experience can enhance retention, improve student preparedness, and better align undergraduate education with the evolving needs of the engineering workforce.