Increasing retention through Introduction to Engineering Design

This paper describes the laboratory component of the Introduction to Engineering freshman course offered in the School of Electrical, Computer & Energy Engineering (ECEE) at Arizona State University. The lab component was designed to excite the students about engineering through hands-on lab experiments that expose them to a wide range of areas in electrical and computer engineering including circuits, electronics, communications, digital signal processing, digital image processing, robotics and control. This paper describes the objective, format, and content of the lab and also presents the results of a survey that was given to the students in order to assess the effectiveness of the lab component in increasing retention.