About HOPE

Over the last two years, the UC Berkeley IEEE Student Branch has been developing and facilitating its Hands on Electronic classes for both university and high school audiences. Based on the principle that building a circuit on a breadboard is an intuitive and exciting way to introduce electrical engineering, each lesson features fundamental theory combined with a simple but elucidating circuit. After a short PowerPoint presentation, students are equipped with a soldering iron, multimeter, board, and various electronic components from which they construct a circuit clearly demonstrating the current lesson. Thus after each lesson, the student leaves not only with new knowledge but also a physical manifestation of that knowledge in the form of their breadboard project. Be it in a night light, solar cell battery charger, thermometer, or digital lock, the projects show that electrical engineering is not just abstract equations accessible to only a few, but rather the power to control and design exciting real world applications accessible to all.

We say accessible to all with confidence because our lessons assume no background in the sciences and require no advanced math. Thus we have already offered our class to many humanities majors at UC Berkeley studying English, Anthropology, German, and Geography to name just a few. These students realize the ascendancy of electrical engineering in the today's world, but previously had no means to explore the field due to the many prerequisites concomitant with enrollment in the most basic 4 unit electrical engineering class offered by the university. Although enrollment varies by semester, our students have been diverse, including many women and minorities. We have also taught numerous engineering freshmen who were unsure as to the options available and have helped them to better grasp what a future in electrical engineering might hold.

We are also extending our efforts to bring this course to local high schools. Although last year we gave one lesson to a group of 30 high school students from Oakland, we now plan to offer high schools as many lessons as we give to Berkeley students. It is nearly impossible for a high school student in Berkeley or Oakland to have a sense of what EE really is before they apply to college. Physics class is the closest that these students come to learning about EE and then that is still very theoretical. We plan to use the same hands on, build a circuit with each lesson, approach to show high school students why they might be interested in electrical engineering and should consider it as a possible major. Further, we wish to dispel stereotypes that EE is too complex or theoretical for them to be able to succeed in. We will use the same lesson plans, exercises, and circuits that we employ in the regular course. Like humanities majors taking the course at Berkeley, high school students will not be at a disadvantage as we begin with an assumption that students know nothing about EE.

Contact Us

Email the instructors at hope-instructors@lists.berkeley.edu.