Jacinta, Carissa, and I spent yesterday afternoon lesson planning for our second course at the POLY. This course will cover Electronic Measurement Systems from basic breadboard prototyping to electrodes and physiological signals. We are pitching the course to some professors next week, and I hope they like our ideas and give us some good feedback.

Most of our students will again be electrical engineers; however, because of the limited resources here, many of them may not have had much, if any, hands-on experience with circuits. Much of their coursework is very theoretical, and while they may be able to tell you how to design a band pass filter, we’ll see if they can do it in real life. Furthermore, most of our lectures will be focused on understanding physiological systems and how to transform a heartbeat into a voltage. We will be drawing from Systems Physiology Lab, in which we measured heart signals (ECG), muscle signals (EMG), brain waves (EEG), and basal metabolic rate. While we don’t have all the equipment that we had in the States, we brought a whole lot of electrodes, so we’ll do our best. Our goal is to deliver lectures and labs the first week and have the second week focused on personal design projects that we will pitch to them.

Today we met with Dr. Gamula, the head of the Electrical Engineering department as well as one of his colleagues to showcase the equipment that we brought as well as to run through our ideas for the course. They seemed really excited about using the software and hardware we brought, both for the labs we planned and other courses they already have instituted.