Improving Students' Hands-on Experiences in Learning Signals and Systems

The fast-evolving theory and technology development in electronic and information have been reshaping the telecommunication engineering curriculum due to the fundamental problem between the increasingly volume of knowledge and the limited study hours. It is challenging to enhance students' engineering capability in a systematic approach. We have been designing and developing a telecommunication engineering pipeline and carefully design different courses of the curriculum for telecommunication engineering. The "signals and systems" is one of the fundamental theoretical courses in telecommunication engineering. In this paper, we designed and implemented a virtual laboratory system to improve students' hands-on experiences in effectively learning rather abstract concepts, models and methods in signals and systems. This learning system was developed using the LabVIEW and Matlab hybrid programming to reduce the requirement of the programming background for the students. This tool consists of 8 lab modules for the discrete signal processing and the continuous signal processing. We conducted various system testing experiments to evaluate its usability. Using this system, the students are able to design and implement the lab sessions integrated with a visual computing process and a virtual instrument interactive interface. Our pedagogy practice has shown that this system effectively improves the students learning performance, and more importantly inspires the enthusiasm and motivation of the students for the electronic information discipline.