Rice elec 201 course notes project

The development the Rice University course ELEC 201, Introduction to Engineering Design included the compilation of an extensive set of class notes. The notes are not a text for the course, but rather a set of reference materials. We are currently in the process of transfering that information into Connexions modules and connecting related modules into courses.

Our notes were derived in part, with permission, from course notes developed by Fred Martin for the class 6.270 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. However, a considerable amount of new material has been added, and every subject area has undergone major revision for use at Rice with a class population from all majors. The printed version was a book over 400 pages long.

A number of Rice students have contributed to these notes. For the first version, Kymberly Maxham, our resident poet, labored to make the documentation accessible to individuals who are not science or engineering majors. In 1996, Patrick Frantz, Brendan Daly, and Jennifer Ngo, our new resident poet, all made major contributions. In the summer of 1997, Patrick Hearon and Alexis Beidenfeld put the notes online and made them more readable by humans, and in 1998, Anne Countiss made the on-line version of the book a reality.

The majority of the 1998 printed book is still available at the course web site, largely in its original form. However, web navigation within the book is, to put it kindly, inconvenient, primarily because some of the sections are quite long. We hope the Connexions version will solve many of those problems, and make the material more generally available. I thank the Connexions staff for their help in creating the initial modules.

The M.I.T. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and the M.I.T. Media Laboratory have agreed to unrestricted and free distribution of the robotics technology described in the course documentation for the 6.270 class. The Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the George R. Brown School of Engineering at Rice University have agreed to similar unrestricted distribution of the ELEC 201 class technology and material developed at Rice.