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Home > Academics > Division of Engineering Education > Engineering and Business

Engineering and Business students working together – EE 459/MKT 446


Pilot in Spring 2008

The Embedded Systems Design Laboratory (EE 459L) is a Capstone course intended for seniors in Electrical Engineering and Computer Engineering. Like most Capstone courses it is a project design course where teams of students design and build a moderately complex electronic project. The core subject of the course is designing with embedded processors so that all projects use a microcontroller to implement as much of the design as possible.

Goal
The goal of the class is to encourage communication and cooperation between students from different schools and to approximate the experience the student might encounter if employed as a design engineer. Most engineering students know very little or nothing about marketing the products they help create, while marketing students usually lack valuable insight in product design and development. A successful product requires both engineering and marketing, and good communication and cooperation between the groups.

Course description

The students are divided into teams or two to four people and usually build the same project or are allowed to pick one of two possible projects. The teams give an oral design review to the class early in the semester and a final oral presentation and written report at the conclusion of the semester.

Spring 2008 Course Feedback
(class co-taught by Viterbi School's Alan Weber and Marshall School's Therese Wilbur)

In Spring 2008 the EE 459L class incorporated a significant change in the class curriculum over previous semesters. With the goal of giving the students a more complete view of the process of developing a marketable product, each engineering team was paired up with a team of marketing students from the USC Marshal School of Business.

Due to differences in the class sizes, there were ten engineering teams and five marketing teams. This resulted in each marketing team being associated with two engineering teams and working on two different designs of the product. The joint student teams were responsible for the development of the class product.

Teams met weekly to discuss the product and exchange information. During the meetings, members brainstormed over what features could be implemented and whether they should be incorporated into the product. The final product was the result of both teams working together to come up with a working and marketable product.

Product specifications
  • Individual alarm times for each day of the week. Since student schedules are usually not identical from Monday through Friday, this clock would have ability to program in different wake-up times for each day. This is not a new idea and there are some clocks on the market with this ability
  • Programmable times for an alert tone go off. These could be used to remind the user that it is time to go to class
  • Alarm and alert times are stored in non-volatile memory so that they are retained if the power is lost. This would prevent a customer from having to re-enter several different alarm and alert times after a power outage
  • Battery backup for the clock to keep it running through any power outages