Teaching to Reason and Learn by Problem Solving

In our fast paced, information swamped society, knowledge is often dumped onto students without regard to its effective absorption and utilization. In society, dogmatism, relativism and passive absorption of information dominates in mass media and unfortunately in our classrooms. Traditional lecturing ensures that students are poor readers, writers, listeners and speakers, and do not develop reasoning skills needed in modern, fast changing technologies. Only those professionals who are adaptable and capable of solving new problems will be successful creators of new technologies and able to overturn obsolete practices in their workplace.

It is a role of educators to realize the difficulties that students face in sorting out a tremendous amount of information and help them to apply a new knowledge to problem solving and critical analysis of the existing solutions. Therefore, while structuring a course different elements of work organization have to be considered to establish a creative environment for learning and applying the information to specific design problems. A teacher must have a plan for overall organization of this teaching concept, specify requirements that students must meet (perhaps involving students in the course organization planning phase), and structure the grading policy to stimulate students in reaching the specified objectives.

According to the National Institute of Education, college instruction is criticized for transmitting information while ignoring students acquisition of knowledge and understanding, and ignoring supervision of students to demonstrate reasoning about challenging problems. Knowledge is best assimilated and utilized when students actively participate in the learning process. Even if the teacher invites student participation, a small number of students tend to dominate. The teacher must facilitate active learning not only by encouraging student-faculty contacts but by encouraging cooperation between students. There is only one instructor in a lecture room to answer a single student’s question, but many of these questions can be answered immediately by his classmates. By involving students in the learning process, the teacher achieves a major objective - active learning.

In order to promote active learning, my lectures are designed on the principle of problem solving and group processing of the acquired knowledge. Students are encouraged to collaborate during the problem solving phase, but are individually evaluated based on how well they have learned the subject and practical design techniques. Course syllabi, schedule, and other relevant information are placed on the Internet for immediate access and feedback. Students can access other students work and review course material on line. This makes course material and its organization more attractive to students and enhances their level of interest in the learning process.

To stimulate collaboration I encourage students to interact between themselves as well as with the teacher. I encourage them to cooperate in lab and in problem solving process. At the same time I try to properly recognize and reward their individual involvement and level of preparation. Engineers in industry do not solve a company’s problems alone - they work in groups, they are responsible as a team for the success of the final project. While competition between individuals is natural, cooperation should be taught and exercised in order to involve students in positive interdependence.

Designing the course structure I must decide how to facilitate cooperation between students, the manner in which class is divided into groups, the amount of content that is covered, the way of presenting the course material and patterns of every day instruction. This organization is adaptable to the existing learning environment. I must constantly assess how to teach to make students involved, and develop understanding, knowledge and abilities to reason in a specific subject area.

Each student is unique. Since effective lecture requires students participation, students must be involved in the presentation and must be encouraged to actively seek information, skills and insights. I pay close attention to each student’s individual needs and either try to help him/her, if he/she missed a concept or two, or give him/her individual tasks which can bring him/her up to the level required by the course. The amount of direct help is in strict relation to the class size. When the class size is significant, teaching assistants help to individualize the learning process. At the beginning of each lecture students are given cues of what is expected of them in the lecture. I try to make the content of a lecture and means to communicate it suitable and attractive to students. Creativity is a major goal of a lecture, therefore I encourage my students to be creative learners.

Requirements for Teaching Modern VLSI Design Courses

Traditionally, the major focus in teaching VLSI design was on digital integrated circuits. In the bottom-up design approach, in traditional circuit design courses, the behavior and performance of circuit components was emphasized. While this results in good understanding of the component level operation, it does not help to develop skills needed for the system level design. In a top-down approach the system level behavior and description is emphasized. A hierarchical organization of the design description, used in hardware description languages and in software design and simulation tools, simplifies the design work by hiding unnecessary details of the designed system.

I am in favor of the in-between treatment of the design process. Only by understanding real complexity of devices, circuits, and components of the designed system, can designers deal with major pitfalls facing them in the design of high performance circuits. Students not only must be aware of the limitations of existing design tools, but must be able to reason about solving these limitations when technology changes require that devices will be operated at higher frequencies, larger integration, and rapidly changing design environment.

Many VLSI design curricula would teach a relatively slow pace design process. However, the tremendous advantages in microelectronics technology and increase in complexity of manufactured designs, require engineers trained in the most effective design methodologies. These new methodologies include system level design (supported by hardware description languages), software hardware codesign in which software design is integrated with hardware design process, and reduction of design cycles by the use of layout cell generators, synthesis tools and virtual prototyping techniques.