An elective laboratory course has been developed at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute to motivate freshmen for further study of engineering in general and to spur interest in electrical and computer engineering in particular. The course philosophy is that hands‐on laboratory and design experiences build student confidence, stimulate curiosity, and demonstrate the relevance of engineering work — thereby increasing motivation and retention. This paper describes the structure of the new course and reports on the evaluation results, which confirm that carefully structured hands‐on experience is an effective way of motivating freshmen. Evaluation results also indicate that the course has increased student creativity and confidence. Since the lab course is just one credit, it appears possible to address the motivation problem without overloading already crowded first‐year engineering programs.

No abstract

A computer-assisted, experiential course of instruction on early diagnosis of substance abuse was developed and compared to three existing substance abuse curricula for third-year medical students on family medicine clerkships. The experimental course, requiring 2 hours of teacher contact, consisted of three computer-assisted instruction modules, active discussion, role play, opportunities for applying new knowledge and clinical skills, and modelling of clinical interest by a family doctor. The three comparison educational programmes were a one-week immersion experience on a substance abuse in-patient unit, 1-4 hours of lecture, and no formal teaching. For 6 months, all third-year medical students at Jefferson Medical College were exposed to one of these courses, and to the same required readings on substance abuse, on their required family medicine rotations at different clerkship sites. They completed end-of-rotation questionnaires assessing their knowledge, satisfaction with substance abuse teaching, and motivation for continued learning. Groups were similar with regard to demographic variables, academic performance, and previous curricular and extra-curricular exposure to substance abuse. Despite a possible selection bias favouring the immersion experience, the computer-assisted course resulted in higher levels of knowledge on early diagnosis, but similar attitudes and satisfaction. The computer-assisted and immersion courses produced more favourable outcomes than lecture-based teaching and no formal teaching. Compared to no formal teaching, lecture did not produce measurable effect. The results suggest that a computer-assisted, experiential substance abuse course, based on relevant and practical goals, can efficiently augment knowledge and motivation for further learning of third-year medical students.

dvanced power system applications software is available in modern enerplanning and study purpose, it is not suited for operators under a real-time environment. The primary interest of the disgy management systems t o analyze power network conditions and t o patcher is to assess and summarize assist operators in monitoring and the current system conditions quickcontrolling power distribution. The ly, and identify any problem areas. Unfortunately, this very basic need has not been met up to this point.procurement of many of the EMSs is justified primarily by the economic and security monitoring of colors, sym bols,The graphical user interface benefits of these functions. In graphs, and data layering described in this article was s p i t e of many algorithmic developed using X/Motif toolkits. advancements, these functions to enable rapid The X-based user interface has are still not being utilized fully by interpretation of results evolved from low-level graphical the utility industry, and by disroutines t o a set of higher level patchers in particular. and trendsbuilding-block objects that may be A Highly interactive displays make use Some of t h e salient reasons for not using these applications include poor performance, lack of reliability and consistency of solutions, difficulties in software and database maintenance, and, most importantly, complexity and difficulty in interfacing and interacting with these functions. By nature, these functions produce voluminous numeric data, and operators have trouble interpreting the results efficiently.In recent years, much effort has been expended to improve the performance of these functions. New and very robust algorithms have been developed. The orthogonal state estimator and linear-programmingbased OPF are good examples of this type of enhance ment. The problems related t o maintaining the power system network database have been addressed by use of sophisticated relational and objectaiented databases. However, t h e single-most important issue, t h e advanced application user interface, has not been fully explored and resolved.Despite all of the advancements in the hardware and full graphic technology, most advanced applications software available in the marketplace still use character graphics. Required input data and solution output are presented in tabular form. Although this method of data presentation may be appealing to software engineers for * Siemens Energy & Automation, Inc., Empros Power Systems Control configured by the user to form any user interface display. Motif-based widgets and gadgets are examples of higher level building block objects. TheMotif-based appearance has been so widely accepted that it has caused the open system market to focus on developing workstation software applications compliant with Motif. Presently, there are many graphical user interface development environments (GUIDES) in the marketplace. These are high-level toolkits to create the layouts for data, status, and user interactions. These toolkits are built on the objectaiented progr...

No abstract