"Undergraduate electromagnetics for the future: discrete, numeric, and analytic"

For the past six years the first course in engineering electromagnetics at Rose-Hulman has focused on the standard lumped elements of circuits - resistors, capacitors, and inductors. The course coverage is limited to quasi-static, 2D Cartesian geometries with no leakage flux - conditions that are descriptive of many ideal, lumped circuit elements with which the students are already familiar. These limitations reduce the complexity of the field expressions, yet retain the essential features of multi-dimensional fields. In addition, spatial discretization and numeric methods provide the foundation from which the properties and behavior of electromagnetic vector fields are developed. Most importantly, the duality of the fields in these lumped elements enables the use of Laplace\´s equation to describe the fields in all three elements. A powerful, PC-based, interactive, real-time, electromagnetic computation engine, VEM2.0, has been developed that empowers students to experiment with the geometry and material properties of 2D electromagnetic problems. Our observations indicate that students find this approach more "connected" with the physical world than the traditional approach.