Impact of Human Side of Engineering Approach in an Undergraduate Electromagnetics Course

In most electrical engineering programs, the undergraduate electromagnetics course is required for all students. Broadly, the course delves into historical perspectives, vector calculus-based problem solving and concepts of wave propagation. Several students consider the course to be challenging since they are required to connect electrical engineering concepts through the platform of vector calculus. To address this challenge, in our course, students participate in a set of in-class activities (reflections) where they discuss, review, and think about the concepts and their learning, and then solve related problems in small groups. Each student brings a unique perspective in terms of what they might already know or have figured out while listening to the instructor. The groups work together to solve the problems and submit their work (reflections) at the end of the activity. Our approach provides students with an opportunity to interact with one another, learn from different perspectives, work through the problems and also reach out to the instructor with possible questions. It is expected that while the concepts are still challenging, the students can find ways of working through them by solving problems in class with the support of their peers. This method, where students share their learning process in-class and learn together is the main approach towards creating a community-based inquiry environment where the humans can engage not as viewers but as active participants and thinkers. In our work, we will study the in-class activities to quantify the impact of the learning environment on the students learning. Ultimately, we will seek to see if the students benefit from learning as a community.