Teaching design with behavior modification techniques in a pseudocorporate environment

This paper describes a strategy which was developed to effect desired behavioral change in a junior year electronics design laboratory course, corequisite to a second electronics course. Since any such strategy requires a schedule of reinforcement, the setting of the course was changed to that of a new employee orientation and probationary program with the instructor serving as Manager of Engineering and the Teaching Assistants serving as staff engineer-mentors. A pseudocorporate philosophy was adopted and rigorously implemented, including standards for written and oral communications, corporate e-mail, and performance evaluations. Open-ended design projects were assigned by memos giving customer needs including electrical power and cost constraints. Initial student feedback indicates that, despite time constraints, this approach not only forces students to face open-ended design problems and professional communications in a new way, but also confronts them with the need to achieve a certain of intuitive understanding of the subject as opposed to the memorization of equations and problem unique solution patterns.