An Individual Investigator Development Plan to Improve Undergraduate Debugging Skills and Mindset

提高本科生调试技能和心态的个人研究者发展计划

• 批准号: 2321255
• 负责人: John Hu
• 金额: $ 35万
• 依托单位: Oklahoma State University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2023
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2023-09-15 至 2026-08-31
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2321255&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Individual; Investigator; Development; Plan; Improve

This project serves the national interest of semiconductor workforce development by understanding how to teach circuit debugging in undergraduate courses. As the transistor count and complexity of today’s chips grow, thanks to Moore’s Law, fewer new chips can work perfectly for the first time. Hence, a high level of engineering effort is put into debugging, a process that identifies and fixes any discrepancies between the expected and measured chip behavior. This project seeks to explore how immersive and domain-specific training can significantly enhance undergraduate students’ ability to debug complex circuits and improve their overall approach and mindset to problem-solving. In parallel to the research component, the principal investigator will participate in an intensive professional development plan to expand his knowledge and skills in study design, quantitative methods, and educational psychology. Other potential benefits of this project include increased employability and career prospects, strengthened industry-academia collaboration, and reduced debug time and cost in new product development.The goal of the project is to design a rigorous pilot study to infer a causal relationship and quantify how much a holistic and domain-specific debug training intervention improves undergraduates’ circuit debugging skills and mindset. The PI will adopt design-based research to create the intervention and a quasi-experimental design to study the impact. The cognitive portion of the intervention will include teaching common circuit issues and global debugging strategies adapted from industry content. The affective component will consist of mandatory bug reporting and extra credit incentives for students to participate in building root cause tables. The debugging mindset will be measured using established instruments. The debugging performance will be tested via custom-developed tools validated by industry experts. This project will advance our understanding of how to teach debugging in college. The project is supported by NSF’s EDU Core Research: Building Capacity in STEM Education Research (ECR: BCSER) program, which is designed to build investigators’ capacity to carry out high-quality STEM education research.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

该项目通过了解如何在本科课程中教授巡回赛调试，从而为半导体劳动力发展提供了国家利益。随着当今芯片的晶体管数量和复杂性的增长，感谢摩尔定律，更少的新筹码可以首次完美地工作。因此，在调试中进行了高水平的工程工作，该过程可以识别并确定预期和测量的芯片行为之间的任何差异。该项目旨在探讨身临其境和特定领域的培训如何显着增强本科生调试复杂电路并改善其整体方法和思维方式的能力。与研究组件并行，首席研究人员将参加一项密集的专业发展计划，以扩大他在研究设计，定量方法和教育心理学方面的知识和技能。该项目的其他潜在好处包括提高就业能力和职业前景，加强行业 - 阿卡德血症的协作以及减少新产品开发中的调试时间和成本。该项目的目的是设计一项严格的试点研究来推断有因果关系并量化因果关系和领域特异性的调试培训培训的程度，从而降低了电路的能力和思维量不足。 PI将采用基于设计的研究来创建干预措施和准实验设计来研究影响。干预的认知部分将包括教授常见电路问题和根据行业内容改编的全球调试策略。情感组成部分将包括强制性错误报告和额外的信用激励措施，让学生参与构建根本原因表。调试心态将使用已建立的工具来衡量。调试性能将通过由行业专家验证的自定义开发工具进行测试。该项目将促进我们对如何在大学中教授调试的理解。该项目得到了NSF的EDU核心研究的支持：STEM教育研究（ECR：BCSER）计划的建筑能力，该计划旨在建立研究人员进行高质量STEM教育研究的能力。该奖项反映了NSF的法定任务，并被认为是通过使用基金会的知识和更广泛影响的评估来审查CRITERIA的评估来通过评估来通过评估来获得支持的。