Visual transitions: using multimedia to tie ideas together

Engineering is a multitude of ideas, many of which are related to each other in some non-obvious ways. Students that see these relationships have an insight as to how things in two apparently different areas might affect each other. For example, how the positions of poles and zeros affect frequency response or how a spectrogram relates to a sound. A visual transition is an animation whose purpose is to illustrate the ties between two entities. This paper shows four visual transitions for a new discrete signal processing course. The course is designed to build sophomore students intuition about signals and systems by relating sounds and images to their mathematical descriptions. The course uses numerous in-class demonstrations (many are visual transitions) to motivate learning. The in-class demonstrations are being captured on the World Wide Web so the students can explore them outside of class.