Ko Thae Hwan, a researcher at the Faculty of Communication, has combined special purpose development devices and application programs in his lectures so that the students could understand easily what they learnt and apply it to practice actively.
In order to make students study with active attitudes as a seeker after new knowledge instead of receiving it with passive attitudes, it is necessary to make a proper combination of traditional and progressive teaching methods drawing on traditional ones.
This subject deals with several signal processing principles for amplification, filtering, generation, detection, operation of electric and physical signals, and the determination of parameters, system design and application methods. As the subject has a large proportion of theoretical lectures and touches a lot of things based on mathematical principles, it is important to provide students with as many chances of practice as possible to confirm the relationship between basic principles and practical application.
In the past, students used to learn the basic principles of a filter only in a theoretical way and to design it to simulate in experiments. Therefore, they had to analyze the operating characteristics of a filter only in a simulation environment, but could not see how it worked in reality, which resulted in low cognition effect.
For instance, since teaching on basic mathematical principles accounted for nearly 70% of the whole lecture, students faced an absolute limit of time to associate what they were learning with issues arising in engineering practice. In addition, no combination of simulation tools and devices for the analysis of the operation of a filter left them with a poor grip of the real characteristics even after lectures.
To solve such problems, he, first of all, combined a DSP development device and MATLAB in the lecture.
A notable difference from previous lectures is the frequent utilization of MATLAB.
When teaching on the approximation of an ideal low pass filter, he combined the theoretical calculation of the transfer function and the order and pole of a filter with MATLAB simulation so that they could compare the amplitude-frequency and phase-frequency characteristics under various design conditions, therefore ensuring maximum teaching density and helping them master the theories and methods of designing a digital filter at the same time. In this way, he did not focus on mathematical analysis or results, but on directing them to get the physical meaning of the design and the calculation process through simulation, which made them think about the corresponding simulation tools whenever they came across certain expressions.
Second, making an organic link of a DSP development device and MATLAB in the subject design, he put a simulation environment and the manufacture of a real filter into one.
Although the utilization of MATLAB certainly does help students have a good understanding of the design of a digital filter, it is not able to stimulate their creative power to the full. For this reason, he provided with a DSP development device for them to do experiments on and analyze the operation of a filter in the communication system.
For example, he gave every student different assignments so that they could compare the results from MATLAB and the DSP development device and draw conclusions on their own. Thus, they were able to find and correct their design mistakes so as to be well aware of the methods of design and implementation.
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