Teaching statistics to Electronics Engineering Technology students

Abstract

Statistics is an important tool for robustness analysis, measurement system error analysis, test data analysis, probabilistic risk assessing, and many other fields in the engineering world. However, traditionally statistics is not covered extensively in undergraduate engineering technology programs. Usually the students take a statistics course from the Statistics Department as a prerequisite for other engineering courses and seldom use the knowledge they learned in the course again, until they graduate from school and are faced with real-world statistics based engineering tasks. By then they have forgotten most of what they learned in the statistics course, or it was not relevant to the engineering applications encountered in the real-world. Based on the results from existing literatures in the area of statistics education, a unique learning-by-using approach is proposed for the Electronics Engineering Technology program at Texas A&M University. Simple statistical concepts such as standard deviation of measurements, signal to noise ratio, and Six Sigma are introduced to students in different courses. Design of experiments (DOE), regression, and Monte Carlo method are illustrated with practical examples before the application of these tools to specific problems the students face in their engineering projects. Software is used to conduct statistical analysis. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2009.