Companion Website Introduction
Preface
|
 |
Introductory Circuits for Electrical and Computer Engineering is a one-semester version of the most widely used introductory circuits text of the past 15 years. Importantly, the underlying
teaching approaches and philosophies remain unchanged. The
goals are:
-
To build an understanding of concepts and ideas explicitly in
terms of previous learning. The learning challenges faced by
students of engineering circuit analysis are prodigious; each
new concept is built on a foundation of many other concepts.
In Electric Circuits, muchattention is paid to helping students
recognize how new concepts and ideas fit together with those
previously learned.
-
To emphasize the relationship between conceptual understand-ing
and problem-solving approaches. Developing the students’
problem-solving skills continues to be the central challenge
in this course. To address this challenge examples
and simple drill exercises are used to demonstrate problem-solving
approaches and to offer students practice opportunities.
We do so not with the primary aim of giving students
procedural models for solving problems; rather, we empha-size
problem solving as a thought process in which one applies
conceptual understanding to the solution of a practical
problem. As such, in both the textual development and in the
worked out examples, we place great emphasis on a problem-solving
process based on concepts rather than the use of rote
procedures. Students are encouraged to think through problems
before attacking them, and we often pause to consider
the broader implications of a specific problem-solving situation.
-
To provide students with a strong foundation of engineering
practices. There are limited opportunities in a sophomore year
circuit analysis course to introduce students to real world
engineering experiences. We continue to emphasize
the opportunities that do exist by making a strong effort to
develop problems and exercises that use realistic values and
represent realizable physical situations. We have included
many application type problems and exercises to help stimulate
students’ interest in engineering. Many of these problems
require the kind of insight an engineer is expected to
display when solving problems.