Hi everyone,

Last week July 19th through July 23rd, the High Impact Technology Exchange Conference was held in in Scottsdale, Arizona. As a sponsor of this conference, the eSyst Systems Approach to Electronics (NSF Project #0702753) conducted a half day workshop for 31 faculty from around the United States and hosted a technology showcase booth during the event.

The purpose of the workshop was focused on implementation of the project’s developed resources. What was unique this year was the absence of the nay sayers. In past conferences it was heard: “I could not implement the systems approach”, “You are dumbing down the curriculum”, “This stuff scares me, and I am going to continue teaching what I have been”, or “There is no textbook for me to use to implement this appraoch.” Well I am glad that either we scared away all of them or maybe there are those who are more open today to the systems approach and really came to hear from others how they plan to implement this top-down systems approach.

Based on the feedback from the workshop attendees, all agreed that the top-down or big picture approach to teaching electronics topics was a move in the right direction towards updating their legacy programs. We started with an overview of two new electronics systems simulations showing the big picture view of a home media system and the operations of a four-bit microprocessor from the block diagram. See. http://www.esyst.org Student Resources and the Microprocessor course resources for these two free resources. We followed these overviews with demonstrations of three of the eSyst Systems lab activities to show how the eSyst Systems resources can be used to teach the systems approach. This really impressed the attending faculty.

The purpose of the technology showcase booth was to provide a wider dissemination of the project’s resources and this was accomplished via the demonstration of two additional systems lab activities and a live internet feed of the eSyst web site and resources. The booth was heavily visited from other projects and with many new converts to the systems approach being started.

If you would like to learn more about the eSyst Systems Approach to Teaching Electronics programs, please see the web site for details and free access to of all these resources at http://www.esyst.org.  You can also review six recorded webinars the project has completed via http://www.matecnetworks.org and use the Key Search Word “esyst webinars” which will give you a listing of all our recorded webinars. If you have any comments please post them below.

Tom McGlew