Synergy of educational tools in teaching of a new lecture/lab course on electromagnetic fields andwaves

Electromagnetic Fields and Waves (EFW) courses for undergraduate students are usually taught in traditional lecture style. The instructors that teach EFW courses using this conventional method encounter several problems including these: 1. There is disconnect between the mathematics used to describe electromagnetic phenomena and the physics, even when one or two chapters on mathematical topics is given at the beginning of the semester. The situation is even worse if the teachers rely on students' knowledge from math courses. 2. There is disconnect between the theory discussed in the lectures and the experiments carried out in the accompanying lab. This disconnect is made more severe by two factors: (a) sometimes the lab either precedes or lags behind the lecture material and (b) the theory and the lab are taught by two separate instructors who profess different teaching philosophies and have different ideas about what is important and what is not. 3. In the present teaching system the assessment of students' understanding of the subject is infrequent. Typically it consists of a final exam with one or two midterm exams. As a result the students do not put a uniform effort in learning during the course but, under pressure from their other courses, apply themselves to the EFW course for only a short period of time just before the exams, resulting in an uneven and incomplete learning. To overcome the problems described above we are developing a conceptually novel onesemester EFW course for engineering junior undergraduate students and establishing a new undergraduate EFW laboratory. This course is a four credit-hour lecture/lab course (three credit hours are for the lecture component and one credit hour for the lab component of the combined course). A novel style of teaching this EFW course is based on the interactive approach - experiment - Theory - experiment - Applications. In this approach we emphasize that: 1. Each theoretical topic, described in the lecture part of the course, is covered by a lab experiment. 2. To acquire new abstract notions the educational Java applets will be heavily employed. Java applets will be used in a way that provides only active style of learning. Java applets, as used in traditional lectures, provide only a passive experience. 3. Connected with Java applets are means for numerical solutions of electromagnetic problems. Students will be able to compare numerical results with the experimental data that they obtained carrying out lab experiments as well as with the results provided by Java applets. 4. The students' progress will be assessed each week by giving them: (a) in-class quizzes and (b) out-class quizzes using the Blackboard online system. This will ensure a uniform effort by the students which is expected to result in a better understanding of the course material. Thus, the undergraduate engineering students through experiments, educational Java applets, and software for numerical solution actively learn the theoretical principles of EFW, apply them to real-world problems, and develop a scientific approach, which improves critical reasoning and creative thinking.