Teaching the nonscience major: EE101-The digital information age

EE 101—The Digital Information Age, a course taught for the past six years to nonscience majors and freshmen considering electrical engineering as a major, is one the largest courses at Yale with a cumulative enrollment of approximately 2700 students. The goal is to describe how common-place digital information systems work and why they work that way by illustrating clever engineering solutions to technological problems. The course considers the following topics: information sources, logic gates, computer hardware and software, measuring information using entropy, error detection and correction coding, compression, encryption, data transmission and data manipulation by computer. Earlier versions of EE101 included both hardware and software projects. The hardware project was to implement a bean counter using digital logic modules. The software project involved writing a personal World Wide Web page and developing a Web page for a Yale-affiliated organization. Recent versions replaced the hardware project with additional Internet projects that receive data from a Web page viewer and that measure transmission times and the number of nodes between a source and destination. Having completed the course, students feel that they have an appreciation for the digital information systems they encounter on a daily basis.