Class Notes:
The lecture was provided through
a power point presentation which emphasizes the ethical responsibilities of
an electronic engineer towards environment through information on
environmental hazards due to electronic devices and some possible design
methodologies to control them. The module is divided into six sub-modules,
each concentrating on a specific topic as follows,
- Ethical Responsibilities
- E-Waste
- Lead-Free Electronics
- Low Power Electronic Circuit Design
- Data Centers
- Legislations for Environment Friendly Electronics
The entire education module is 60
minutes long followed by a 15 minutes session for students to complete a
questionnaire used to evaluate the students and obtain feedback from them.
View
Slide
E-Waste video from
“60 Minutes” show in CBS
Data Center video from
IBM
Data Sheets:
Questionnaire:
The questionnaire consisted of 16
evaluation questions and 4 feedback questions.
Evaluation:
These questions were asked
to evaluate the student's understanding towards the topics that are
discussed in our education module. Rubrics for each question are formed by
providing grades A, B or C. Our main goal is to gauge the amount of
knowledge acquired by the students through the proposed education module.
So the questions are designed in such a way that there are possibilities of
partially correct answers yielding grade B, which eventually means that the
student has acquired some useful knowledge of the topic as opposed to none.
The following table gives the number of questions asked in each topic.
Ethical Responsibilities
|
2
|
E-Waste
|
3
|
Lead-Free Electronics
|
3
|
Low Power Electronic Circuit
Design
|
3
|
Data Centers
|
3
|
Legislations for Environment
Friendly Electronics
|
2
|
Feedback:
To obtain the student’s feedback,
they were asked the following questions.
1)
Do you think this exposure was helpful to understand some of the ethical
issues as a VLSI Designer?
- a. Very Helpful
- b. Somewhat helpful
- c. I already knew most of
it
- d. No use at all
2)
In future do you like more emphasis of which of the following area
- a. Design issues of
Lead-free computing
- b. Just enough energy computing
- c. Knowing more about laws
- d. Low power design issues
- e. Cooling techniques
3)
What is the most important take-home message of this environment-friendly
green computing knowledge module?
4)
Any suggestions:
Sample Questionnaire:
![](../images/nsf.jpg)
This website details research
activities performed using the infrastructure acquired through the National
Science Foundation Computing Research Infrastructure (CRI) grant # 0551621
Disclaimer: This material is
based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant
No. 0736971
|