Recycling Graduate Coursework to Introduce Freshmen to Engineering Fields
Jhon A. Henao-Sepulveda, Manuel Toledo-Quiñones, José G. Colom-Ustáriz, Rafael Benítez Medina · 2004
The great technological advances of the last fifty years have increased the complexity of engineering education. Students have to make choices about their areas of concentration early in their studies. It becomes necessary to present introductory material about the different areas of work during the freshman year, and many universities have created special courses to accomplish this. This article describes a process in which class-work from a graduate-level course has been used to introduce engineering college freshmen to the areas of imaging and computer vision. For this purpose, graduate students taking a computer vision course were asked to prepare the courses' homework, practical exercises and final projects in a way compatible with the format of tutorials. This material was collected and organized into a coherent document and presented to freshman students taking a hands-on, introductory course in the department's Tools and Toys Laboratory. The tutorial introduces basic concepts, provides an interface to run programs illustrating these ideas, and suggests simple exercises for further learning. Besides providing an effective, hands-on way of introducing entry level students to the different areas of study in their chosen profession, this type of activity can give new meaning to the work performed in graduate courses. The article discusses the structure of the graduate and undergraduate courses, the tutorial organization, the topic selection and our future plans.