Honors tutorial: Engineering literacy for the 21st century

Syllabus- Spring 2008

HON 312

Meeting times: Tuesdays: 10:00-11:15

                          Thursday: 10:00-11:15

We will usually meet once a week with the rest of the time devoted to projects.

Instructor:  Emmanuel Boss, emmanuel.boss@maine.edu

Lab manager: James Loftin, James_Loftin@umit.maine.edu

Office hours: by appointment

Course goal: Introduce undergraduate students to programming, sensors and robotics through hands-on projects.

Student responsibilities: attend classes, be on time, maintain an active blog, provide feedback via blog and via discussions with instructor, read reading material, submit assignments.

Assignments: assignment consist of a series of project accomplished about every two weeks. Assignment will come with a rubric detailing what is expected of the students for a given grade. Extra credit will be awarded to projects that go above and beyond the rubric expectation.

Grading:

Participation: 20%.

Assignments: 60%

Blog (weekly): 20%  (blog handout + rubric [PDF]). 

Reading:  Reading material will be provided as needed to feel in knowledge gaps needed for deeper understanding of concepts associated with projects and to expand our understanding of the larger issues associated with technology.

Syllabus, subject to change, (last updated 03/22/2008):

Week	date	topic	Assignment/ additional material
I	Jan 15	Introduction and course mechanics.	Assignment (for Fri, Jan 18th): set up a Blog. Readings: watch the whole of Pausch's (last) seminar at Carnegie Mellon: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=362421849901825950&pr=goog-sl. Come to class ready to discuss it.
	Jan 17	Begin programming with Alice.	Readings: Ch. 1 + appendices of Learning to Program with Alice. Assignment (due Tue, Jan 22nd) [PDF]
II	Jan 22	Alice
	Jan 24
III	Jan 29	Alice	Final Alice Assignment (due Tue. Feb 5th) [PDF] Read for Thu. the introduction and Ch. 1 of Physical Computing. class chat on artificial intelligence. See Turing (1950) [PDF]
	Jan 31		Choose 1st sensor to build in sensor unit (so we can insure supplies are available).
IV	Feb 5	Scratch	Alice students projects: Gram Stain (project, writeup), Baxter park (project), Park ranger (project), Global warming (project) and CPR (project, writeup).
	Feb 7		Scratch Assignment (due Thu. Feb 26th) [PDF] Resources: http://scratch.mit.edu/pages/educators
V	Feb 12	Scratch
	Feb 14
VI	Feb 19	Sensor	Readings: http://tigoe.net/pcomp/basic elec.shtml - basic electronics See also: http://www.owlnet.rice.edu/~elec201/Book/basic_elec.html. Weekly task [PDF] Sensor Assignment 1(due Tue. Mar 18th) [PDF]
	Feb 21
VII	Feb 26	Sensor	Scratch project presentations.
	Feb 28		Scratch students projects: Prey-predator game, simulation_1, simulation_2 (with schooling, related ppt),  epidemiological simulation, chemo and magneto taxis.
---------------February 29- March 17 spring break-------------
VIII	Mar 18	Programmable Sensor	Sensors presentations. Programmable sensor assignment [PDF]
	Mar 20		Programmable sensors presentations.
IX	Mar 25	Robotics
	Mar 27		Readings from Science magazine (introduction, ethics)
X	Apr 1	Robotics
	Apr 3
XI	Apr 8	Robotics
	Apr 10
XII	Apr 15	Robotics
	Apr 17
XIII	Apr 22	Final robotics project.
	Apr 24
XIV	Apr 29	Final robotics project. presentations
	May 1