Building learning bridges among undergraduate courses of Electronics, Power Electronics and Electric Drives Lab

This paper presents the authors' innovative teaching practice of linking three core courses (Electronics in Junior first semester, Power Electronics in Junior second semester and Electric Drives Lab in Senior first semester) in Electrical and Computer Engineering curriculum with special designed projects and labs. Traditionally these three courses are taught in relative isolation with each course focusing on its own teaching materials and structure. Even though students get satisfied grade and successfully complete all the experiments for each course, they still struggle when coming to combine all the knowledge they learned to design and integrate a complex system. The idea is to deliver these three courses as a group and introduce the concept of the higher level course in the lower level course by special designed course projects to reveal the linkage between the two courses by employing zoomin/out approach.