Peer Legacy for ENGR131-132: "Transforming ideas to innovation I and II "

All students who have previously taken ENGR131 and/or ENGR132 are welcome to use this page to leave comments/give advice for future students. Please note that these courses used to have other numbers. If you took them when they had a different number, please specify that number.

• ENGR 126 was the equivalent course I took. The only explicit outcome of this class that I still use today is the ability to use MatLab. Other memories of this class include making Excel spreed sheets and setting rules for a paper plane contest, which might have some implicit benefits such as team working experiences and some basic thinking skill as an engineer. Overall that course was doing fine for one with such vague and broad purposes. But I would have liked it better if it deals with more realistic problems for to be engineering students in their perspective areas. That is to say, if an to be ECE student can use some simple ECE knowledge and work with a ME, CE or BME on more hands on projects, that will be great. --Yi Yue

• When I took this course, it was called ENGR195 and I hated it. It was such a time consuming course. It contains two parts: project design and MATLAB learning, in other words, meeting and coding. But you should know that every little effort pays back and I am glad I treated this course seriously. The ability of project design and ability of using MATLAB for data analysis are two basic skills for an engineer. So work hard on this course, it will make you life as an engineer a lot more easier. ---Yang Zhu

• I am not sure what course number it was since I transfer from another campuse of Purdue. But I had classes which taught MATLAB, and designa a robot. I think matlab part is important and useful because we use matlab a lot in the future. But I don't see the point to design a robot.It seems I don't learn anything useful during the design class. I felt I wasted a lot of time on it. Even though it was kinda fun, I don't think it worth my time.;---Tianhe Liu

• Back when I took the first year engineering course, it was called ENGR126 I think. It was a semester long course that had 2 or 3 MEA projects and a lot of excel and matlab assignments. In EE courses that I took, excel was never used, but I believe it is heavily used for data organization in the industry. The most important things to learn in the FYE course are matlab and learning how to justify your work. When I took the course, I didn't take MEAs seriously. But if you get in projects and/or research later, justifying why you do something gets critical, like something you would do in MEAs. Learning matlab thoroughly is also critical as it will be heavily used in EE courses. --- Minhoo Kim

• I took this class in Fall 2008 and went by the number ENGR 126. This class introduced us to basic engineering concepts, engineering design, team work, design considerations in sustainability, ethics,etc. This class had a lab, which introduced the use of engineering software MATLAB and EXCEL. There were also several model eliciting activities which incorporated reports and team work. This class is supposed to be a foundational course in engineering for freshmen. However I found this course of very little actual value in my purdue academic career. Since we did not use Matlab extensively till entering junior year of ECE, all the concepts learnt were blurry in my mind and I ended up relearning a lot of it. Also the applications of the assignments suited more towards aero and mechanical engineering disciplines and it did not have any electrical engineering concepts, which made it very uninteresting for me as a freshmen. To get the most out of this class, remember the team activities are really pointless, and the take away lies in programming learnt in Matlab and Excel. So pay more attention towards the later, even though the course stresses more on the prior. --- Anushree Phanse

• When taking this class in Fall 2008, it was called ENGR 126. This class taught me basic stuff about Matlab and Excel. Overall, I consider this class as being very important for FYE students. As an engineer, you will be using Matlab a lot. Without a proper knowledge about Matlab you will suffer a lot as an Engineer. As an EE major, I benefited a lot from this class. I used the knowledge from this class in most of my projects. Also, this course taught me how to write a paper in a professional manner. It helps you work with teammates and produce one result as a team. This skill is highly necessary. If you would like to succeed as an engineer, I highly recommend you know what is going on in this class. One minor improvement that can be done to this class is to focus MORE on Matlab. I hope that students should be taught more about Matlab and maybe C if possible. After all, this was a great class for me. --- JaeSung Youn

• I took this class when it was called ENGR 126. In it, we learned a lot about matlab and excel which, even though i've never used excel since then, were useful because as an engineer, you'll need to know matlab to survive. So learning that alone may have made the course worth it, no matter how boring it got. I think it would be better if the class focused solely on matlab though, because that part of the course was much more important than the others. But besides the actual coursework, you do learn some other valuable skills like how to work in a group to complete a project and also how to think like an engineer. The projects we did were all in groups so we had to learn to work with others no matter how much we didn't want to. And also the projects were all problem solving kind of things, so they taught you how to think like an engineer would think to solve a problem and that is obviously a useful skill to have. --- Chris Romanoff
• When I took ENGR 195 part II, I feel the instructor who taught MATLAB is not professional in programming. The instructor was trying to combine team concepts with MATLAB  GUI interface design, so that he talked less about MATLAB programming skills in the lecture. Since most first year engineering student don't have programming background, I think the instructor should talk about not only using MATLAB as a matrix calculator then directly jump to GUI interface design. The team concept part is simply just tell students how to answer few questions about teamwork. The GUI interface is time-consuming but it is not really a skill I will use in my future ECE courses. -- Bo Yuan

• When I took ENGR 126, I certainly learned how to use MATLAB, and learned what a powerful tool it was. However, I often wondered what the point of the projects we did was. When given projects without some of the guidelines I thought would be necessary, I got frustrated with how pointless it seemed. One example of a project was when we had to quantify the brightness of an image. Really made no sense to me. However, after taking ECE 438, I've done some image processing where the brightness of an image was absolutely essential in filtering applications. While there may certainly be room for improvement with this course, there was definitely some value to it. --- Jesse Bauson

• I took this course in the Fall of 2008 when it was called ENGR 195. Some parts of the class were helpful, like how to use MATLAB, LabVIEW, and Excel. Most of it, however, was pointless. Over the two semesters, we made a device to measure the force of fingers squeezing together 5 times. Every time we used the same batch of k'nex pieces and a spring. It seemed like a colossal waste of time. Two very important things that I did learn were the importance of finding multiple valid solutions to a problem and justifying and explaining every step of the work that you do. --- Eric Owens

• Back in my day, this course was called ENGR 126. It primarily focused on introducing students to MATLAB as a first programming language. Portions of the curriculum also used Excel. The projects in the class focus on team based, generic approaches to solve random problems. A big point in the class is writing in a professional style. As I had no programming experience before this class, I found the MATLAB portion very helpful. The rest of the curriculum I felt did not prepare me for future engineering classes as much. --- Brendon McCool

• I took this class when it was called ENGR 126. As most have said, MATLAB is easily the most valuable tool learned in this class. Besides that, I did not see the point to majority of this class. While you do learn to work in teams, the projects we did not have any lasting impression on me (as I can not even remember them). Considering that they changed the course number, I hope they have also changed the layout of the course to better prepare future engineers for what is to come. --- Hale Petersen

• I took this when it was called ENGR 195. I think the MATLAB is most useful thing we learned in this course. However, I think the other materials are not very useful to students. For example, we got some projects like designing the game to help students to choose their major. I don't think those projects helped. I would like to suggest the instrustor to focus more on Matlab or add some material for C programming. ------------Jun Zhang

• When I took this class it was called ENGR 126. It had two aspects: Matlab and team work skills. the latter was not very useful.. my team didnt really get along and no one helped us solve our problems with each other but the Matlab skills I learnt there have been very useful. Having a good grasp of coding in this class will defifnitely make the rest of your time at purdue as an engineer much easier. ----- Maliha Hossain

• I took these courses as ENGR195a and ENGR195b. I think these courses consists mainly two parts: software usage and engineering cooperation. The first part is great and very useful for later courses. But it seems a little under weight in the courses. If the matlab syntax can be a stand alone class for about 2 credits, that will be very clear and more useful. About the engineering cooperate part, I really don't think I or my peer have learn a lot from that class. As I have seen during most of the ECE class requires a team structure or team project, people still not cooperating very well. Significant teamwork cooperation is very rare. I don't know how to improve this situation. But as I took ME senior design with Mr. John Nolfi, he did a very good job in project management, that some how push us in a nice team construct and cooperating well. Maybe we should talk to and learn from ME project management classes, like ME264, ME364, ME463. ----- Yimin Xiao

• This course was known as ENGR 126 in Fall '07 when I took it. I honestly didn't find it to be very helpful, and was very surprised when I first came to Purdue to find this to be my first engineering course. The major things that were taught in this course were MATLAB, teamwork, and problem solving skills. The problem solving skills and MATLAB went hand-and-hand together, and were somewhat useful. The teamwork subject matter seemed to me like a filler for something that first year engineering could think of to teach. I found it useless, not relevant, and sometimes a waste of time. I learned how to work in a real team later on once I got to ECE labs, and other ECE courses. The only useful thing I got out of ENGR 126 was my first experience with MATLAB. ----- Tylor Thompson

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