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Professor Ann Marie Sastry (center) with Chris Cadotte (left) and Fabio Albano. |
At the end of the winter semester, students in the newly redesigned ME495, ME’s Senior Laboratory, had done more than earn their grades. The class of 113 used a code developed as a Ph.D. thesis project, to improve cell phone battery design. Students were asked to survey UM undergraduates on cell phone usage, and then improve the power supplies for four commercially available cell phones, creating smaller and lower-cost systems.
Professor Ann Marie Sastry redesigned the new course, and taught it for the first time in W05, supervising a team of graduate student and professional instructors. Though laboratory classes are seldom popular, this course received the highest evaluations in its history, as students sharpened their statistical skills and applied them to 'real world' problems. As one student wrote in an end-of-semester evaluation, “[Sastry] was absolutely the best professor I have had here… I liked how the focus was much more on professionalism than getting the grade. I also appreciated the introduction to statistical analysis.”
Students worked in groups and didn't have unlimited time in the lab, said Sastry. "They had to zero in on experiments that were most important for their particular user profiles—and they were responsible for conducting the surveys to inform their work. For instance, some found that IM (instant messaging) was not as popular among college students as the media would have you think. Since it was a low component of power usage, some groups eliminated it from their testing. On the other hand, student users used many more talk minutes than other surveys had estimated."
The class was also tasked with battery testing, which meant they needed to learn a new set of terminology and testing protocols. The doctoral work of Kimberly Cook, (Ph.D., UM BME ‘04, under Sastry’s supervision), was the basis for the project, said Sastry. "She built test rigs for the students, and they used codes developed during her doctoral work for data analysis. It turned into a real-world engineering problem--not everyone gets to see their research used in such an immediate and accessible way, and I’m really proud of Kim’s accomplishments and the mentorship she demonstrated." The research work was supported by the WIMS-ERC, an NSF Center led by Professor Ken Wise (UM EECS), in which Sastry is a co-PI.
By the end of the semester, 27 of 28 student groups had found better, lower-cost designs, including using hybrid power, changes in phone casing to accommodate a larger battery and decreasing capabilities--in line with how students use their phones--to draw less power. "They came up with many different and creative ideas on how to satisfy their cohort," she said, “and they also learned to apply statistics in a meaningful, logical way. The point we kept drilling home was that unlimited experimentation in engineering is not possible: you have to design experiments, and apply rigorous analyses of your data, to efficiently solve problems.”
For Cook, the exercise represented coming full circle in her own education. “Having been an undergraduate student in the department (B.S., UM ME, 1994), I admit that I didn’t love lab—but as an instructor, it was really a wonderful opportunity to work with Sastry to renovate and teach it, the way that I would have liked to have taken it!” Cook, who recently joined the faculty of Mechanical Engineering at Drexel University, continues, “I am looking forward to using what I learned with ME, to use in my teaching at Drexel.”
Student instructors Fabio Albano and Chris Cadotte and former ME Assistant Research Scientist Yun-Bo Yi, who recently accepted a faculty appointment at the University of Denver, were also "terrific, and crucial to the success of the class," said Sastry, and Albano will be using the code that students developed as part of his thesis work. The course, she said, was a winner all-around: "in significantly improving a key course, in mentoring graduate students, in applying research done in our own department, and in having undergraduates solve a real engineering problem. I'm very proud of what they everyone accomplished. We set the bar high, and the class met us there."