User:Ashmanskas/p364/2012/surveyq

From LaPET electronics

If you're willing, please email me your answers to these questions, so that I can make the format of this course as helpful as possible for future students. Your feedback is the most effective mechanism for improving this course for future years. This year's course benefited tremendously from the detailed feedback written down by the Fall 2010 students to a similar survey.

For example, students from Fall 2010 generally wrote that:

• My lecture notes were much more helpful than the textbook reading that I had assigned.
• A gentle, step-by-step introduction is needed before asking students to use Verilog to make state machines, etc.
• The 2010 course tried to cover a bit too much material for a 1.0 credit course.
• It is better to write lab reports than to make the course grade be mostly based on exams and/or problem sets.

---

Questions:

1. What material would you remove from the course?
   • (My own inclination is to remove 1-2 weeks from the transistor portion of the course.)
2. What material would you add to the course (or expand)?
   • (My own inclination is to spend 1-2 more weeks on Arduino programming, beginning with a very basic introduction to programming concepts, so that people with less computer experience can comfortably come up to speed. Also, I think I should write my own short summary of the physics of p-n junctions, diodes, and transistors.)
3. Do you think that the more computer-oriented parts of this course were interesting/worthwhile/helpful?
   • Related topic: is it helpful for physics students if one goal of this course is to gain some computer-programming experience?
4. Has this course helped you to understand electronics?
5. Should the number of meeting hours per week be fewer, more, or about the same?
6. Should there be lectures? If so, should they add to the total time or subtract from the lab time?
   • If there is strong demand for lectures, I think I would either use the first 20-30 minutes of each meeting to reinforce the previous night's reading material, or else provide some KhanAcademy-style 15-minute video lectures to supplement the reading.
7. Should the course meet mornings, afternoons, or evenings?
   • In the past, the labs were 5pm-9pm. I decided that 9am-11am was better than 10am-12pm to avoid conflicts with PHYS 230 and PHYS 411. I think that afternoons (e.g. after 2pm) would be ideal, if we could reserve the space at that time.
8. Is it preferable to meet 3x/week for 2 hours at a time, or 2x/week for 3 hours at a time?