I am Professor Scott Tippens in the Electrical
and Computer Engineering Technology
Department at Southern Polytechnic State University.
I've been teaching here for about 11 years.
And in my opinion,
we have one of the greatest electrical programs around.
Our program is focused on hands-on experience.
Taking the knowledge that you've
gained through early courses
and design projects and
applying those to bigger and bigger systems.
What I have here is
the submarine robot that
we're using to compete in San Diego.
Every year we enter a competition.
It's an international submarine robotics competition.
And we have students work on
this robot platform to get
us ready to compete against schools like MIT,
Cornell, Duke, and so on.
And so this is our second year entry.
And this robot we just put together for
the first time this year or
last year's robots in the closet.
But basically this robot represents
everything that we do in our classes.
We have electrical systems
that drive the motors and propulsions that you see here.
We have four motors here,
two thrusters on the side,
and then two vertical thrusters
that help us go up and down in the water.
We have the two for our electronics
and control circuitry.
We have to program the controller to
interface to the motors as well as to other sensors.
We have sonar sensors
that are able to hear sound underwater.
And we have video cameras two video cameras,
one pointing forward and
one pointing down. They're not here right now.
The teams are actually working on them now.
In fact, some of them are in the background here
working on getting this thing ready for the competition.
We also have a marker launch system that
basically launches small torpedoes,
if you will, at targets at the bottom of the pool.
And as part of the competition specification
and our program,
we really do focus on the hands-on.
And every course we have except for
maybe two courses, is lab based.
So you're going to be in the laboratory,
is working on circuits from
the very beginning circuits courses
to the electronics courses,
all the way through to your senior design courses
where you design small computer systems.
By the time you graduate,
one of the things that our program will do for
you is it will give you the viability in the job market.
You're going to actually have
skills that you can apply today.
The companies love that.
They love to be able to take you and put you
right into a design project so that you can
actually work and make
things happen. You're very productive.
And they're-- you're just in high demand.
This program, well, this program is
incredibly unique because of the hands-on experience.
You'll find a lot of students
when they go to some other schools,
I get a great deal of theory.
But in this and in our curriculum,
you get the theory plus you get
the practical application of
them because you learn by doing.
A lot of people can learn really well in
a book that can open a book and read it,
understand it, do some problems and they're good to go.
But many people, especially like myself,
prefer to learn the theory and
then apply the theory in the laboratories.
And that's really what we do.
We learn the theory and then
we apply it and we make it real,
make it come alive.
Thus, one of the main differences in our program.