Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology
Engineering Curriculum Development
Reproduced with permission from NeXT Computer, Inc.
A Reference Guide to NeXT in Higher Education, Fall 1992
ยช 1992 NeXT Computer, Inc
Integrated curriculum encourages problem solving and collaboration among students
In 1989, after holding several meetings about the state of the school's curriculum, faculty at the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology decided to embark on an innovative redesign of the institute's first-year courses for mathematics, engineering, and physical sciences majors. From the discussions, they discovered two key problems with the existing courses: an overemphasis on rote memorization and failure to integrate the disciplines of science, engineering, and mathematics.
"We wanted to redesign the curriculum to show the connections among basic concepts in technical disciplines and to promote problem-solving skills, independent learning, and the inclination to explore," says Jeffrey Froyd, professor of electrical and computer engineering and one of the curriculum coordinators.
The institute had received grants from the National Science Foundation, Lilly Endowment, Westinghouse Educational Foundation, and GE Educational Foundation to revamp the courses and purchase new equipment.
Froyd says the faculty wanted to acquire a computer platform for the first-year sequence that had a specific combination of built-in features, including networking, electronic mail, Mathematica, a graphical user interface, and virtual memory. Froyd and his colleagues chose NeXT because, as Froyd says, "NeXTSTEP provides an engaging, productive graphical user interface to a powerful computing environment. NeXT offers multitasking, virtual memory, and 68040 computing power combined with an easy-to-use interface. Students have no limits to the computing resources upon which they can draw.
"The user interface enables students to become familiar with the computer rapidly, and the operating system allows them to open as many applications as they need to work on a particular problem," says Froyd. "For example, in this environment a student might simultaneously open the mail application to communicate with other members of a group, Mathematica to examine data, and FrameMaker to prepare a project report."
With 202 NeXT machines currently on campus, a team of seven Rose-Hulman professors teaches the integrated curriculum in several classrooms and computer labs. The courses use bundled software, including Mathematica, FrameMaker, and more than 50 applications developed by faculty and students during the summers of 1990 and 1991.
Among the custom applications are PhysicsWorld, a simulation in which students investigate and visualize the motion of particles in gravitational, electrostatic, and magnetic fields; TaylorSeries, which provides an interface to Mathematica that makes it easier to explore the characteristics of the Taylor series; DataAnalyzer, which helps students plot and fit functions to data; RateLaw, which allows students to simulate the kinetics of chemical reactions; and FieldSimulator, which performs field simulations and draws electric field lines and equipotential lines to help students visualize field line and equipotential contours for electrostatic and gravitational fields.
"The single most important feature of NeXT technology is the NeXTSTEP development environment," says Froyd. "Object-oriented programming and Interface Builder allow us to develop applications we could not develop on another platform with our limited resources."
According to Froyd, the applications clarify difficult concepts and show how concepts from various disciplines are interrelated. For example, students are taught fundamental mathematical concepts by focusing on how the concepts apply to actual problems in physics, chemistry, and engineering instead of simply manipulating equations. Further, students learn programming in a sequence of programming environments: first Mathematica, then C, and finally Objective C and Interface Builder.
During summer 1992, Froyd and 15 of the institute's integrated curriculum students plan to work with John Glover, professor of electrical engineering at the University of Houston, and 12 of his electrical engineering students to develop objects the schools and departments can share. The Rose-Hulman students will develop objects to use in the integrated curriculum and in the institute's Fluid Sciences Learning Center while the Houston students will develop objects for the EE curriculum. The two groups of students will share and review documentation and code via e-mail and then suggest improvements to one another.
NeXT computers have also been used at Rose-Hulman as the basis of several innovative assignments. In one of these projects, students were asked to listen to a recording of a golf ball bouncing (they weren't told what it was) and calculate from what height the object was dropped. As Jerry Fine, associate professor of mechanical engineering who created the exercise, explains, "The golf-ball design project would have been difficult or impossible to do with any other computer. Students were able to run a spreadsheet, Mathematica, a digitized sound recording that could be played over and over, and a graphic representation of the waveforms associated with the sound; all of these integrated nicely into a desktop computer and made it easy to solve a difficult problem."
Besides using NeXT computers for assignments and exploration in the computer lab, students often use the computers during class to try, for example, new applications or plot graphs.
"The network and communication technology built into every NeXT workstation is very important to us," says Froyd. "UNIX, AFS, and Ethernet provide an institute-wide file system so faculty can share instructional materials with students. NeXTmail enables rapid communication among faculty participating in the integrated curriculum and among faculty and students. Speaker/listener objects provide a productive interface to the Mach interprocess communication facilities with which a new class of interpersonal applications can be developed."
In addition to the integrated curriculum, students use NeXT machines in calculus (with Mathematica) and Pascal programming-language courses and in upper-division classes, including Differential Equations, Circuits, Image Processing, and Introduction to Communication Systems.
"Since students started using the NeXT, they are becoming better self-learners," says Froyd. "They're moving toward concentrating on concepts, and many of the students are enjoying the approach. They're becoming more comfortable with the environment and the applications we ask them to use because they're working on a machine where they don't ask, 'Can it do it?' but rather, 'How long will it take?'"
For more information, please contact:
Jeffrey Froyd
Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Department of Engineering
Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology
5500 Wabash Avenue
Terre Haute, IN 47803
(812) 877-8340
froyd@nextwork.rose-hulman.edu