PI: Robert Hendricks, Professor, Materials Engineering

Project Goals or Needs Addressed: "get [the students] excited about material that they really mostly weren’t very interested in…. the students that were being addressed were primarily seniors in electrical engineering…. half of them tell you that (why are you) in EE and…the most common answer is not because I love electrical engineering, …because I hate chemistry and this is a chemistry course. I have got this little mission in life to convince electrical engineers that it really is relevant being in EE that you want to understand something about how semi-conductors are made…."

Project Grants and Expenditures: $9000 (year 8), graduate assistants



 


Materials developed for this project are used in a chemistry of microelectronics materials course taught out of the Materials Science department as a service course to students in the Electrical Engineering department. Materials were also adopted for students taking similar coursework in the Materials Science department.

The instructor placed his handouts and Powerpoint presentations on the Web, so students could listen more intently during class without scrambling to take notes. Relevant class-related images were scanned for inclusion on the Web site. Originally, the materials were placed on a CD, until the Web emerged as the more viable option.

Three CD's were created to describe gallium arsenide site manufacturing, silicon manufacturing, and fiber optic cable manufacturing. Students were involved in the development of these CD's over several semesters, taking site visits to plants, photographing operations, and writing the text content. As described, "...the students loved going to see a plant. They said it was far more interesting, they learned more about how a semiconductor manufacturing process worked by going down and seeing the Roanoke facility, and then writing a segment of it, and photographing it, and having to describe in detail what they did, and the fact that I let them work in teams."