Work in Progress: This Innovative Practice Work in Progress paper reports the continuous reform of a project-based engineering course in a Chinese university, particularly its impact on student engagement. Projects on Electronic Technology is a project-based course offered during the summer semester for sophomores. Students develop a small electronic system in three consecutive weeks. In recent years, we have tried to reform the teaching and learning of this course in many ways, including changing the main deliverable from fixed-topic projects to open-ended, student-driven projects, and a shift from individual to team-based work. The course instructors had witnessed an increase in student engagement. In order to investigate the main factors that improve students' engagement in project-based learning, student feedback was collected through a post-course questionnaire in the summer of 2022. In the questionnaire, we listed 15 potential factors that might impact student engagement in the course. 77 out of 88 students in the summer 2022 course completed the questionnaire. This paper presents and analyzes the top factors that impacted student engagement in the course according to student feedback.

Geotagging images of interest are increasingly important to law enforcement, national security, and journalism. Today, many images do not carry location tags that are trustworthy and resilient to tampering; and landmark-based visual clues may not be readily present in every image, especially in those taken indoors. In this paper, we exploit an environmental signature from the power grid, the electric network frequency (ENF) signal, which can be inherently captured in a sensing stream at the time of recording and carries useful time–location information. Compared to the recent art of extracting ENF traces from audio and video recordings, it is very challenging to extract an ENF trace from a single image. We address this challenge by first mathematically examining the impact of the ENF embedding steps such as electricity to light conversion, scene geometry dilution of radiation, and image sensing. We then incorporate the verified parametric models of the physical embedding process into our proposed entropy minimization method. The optimized results of the entropy minimization are used for creating a two-level ENF presence–classification test for region-of-capturing localization. It identifies whether a single image has an ENF trace; if yes, whether it is at 50 or 60 Hz. We quantitatively study the relationship between the ENF strength and its detectability from a single image. This paper is the first comprehensive work to bring out a unique forensic capability of environmental traces that shed light on an image’s capturing location.

Work in Progress: This Innovative Practice Work in Progress Paper presents how a cross-regional online and offline mixed teaching practice has been carried out by coordinating multiple local universities' laboratory resources. Owing to the COVID-19 epidemic, students could not go back to the campus but stay home all over the country. To work with an electronic system design and implementation project in the Electronic Technology Projects course, students in each team need a public physical workplace equipped with the necessary tools and instruments for circuit debugging and implementation. By utilizing local universities' laboratory resources near their homes, students of the same group could have face-to-face discussions and get offline support from local university laboratory teachers. Each team could also communicate online with course teachers on the technical scheme, detailed design, and fault debugging. While online education can share virtual teaching resources, cross-regional online and offline fusion education can further realize the sharing of entity teaching resources. Twenty-three students have fulfilled their projects in eight local universities under online and offline guidance. Such a teaching attempt has also promoted in-depth cooperation between teachers and students across universities.

Work in Progress: This Innovative Practice Work-in-Progress Paper presents how a portable laboratory kit named Pocket Instruments has facilitated electronic laboratory learning in the undergraduate engineering programs. Traditionally, owing to the lack of necessary instruments at hand, students could only think abstractly and design on paper during pre-lab and post-lab time but could not physically work on their circuits outside the laboratories. Through the corresponding virtual instrument application software deployed on a laptop, the Pocket Instruments can act as a portable signal generator, an oscilloscope, a digital analyzer, and a spectrum analyzer, which makes it possible for students to experiment with electronic circuits freely outside the allocated laboratory time. The teaching practices in the engineering program of Tsinghua University for seven years have shown that such an always-available lab kit can achieve a measurable increase in students' engagement and achievement in experimental exploration. With the growing needs in online learning, the Pocket Instruments can also provide an effective means for distance learning of laboratory skill training.

This Innovative Practice Full Paper presents a survey on how signal processing engineering education has been carried out in China. Although courses on signal processing vary from university to university in China, they mainly fall into four categories: courses on principle, method and technology, application, and implementation. Along with the theoretical teaching of these courses, increasing emphasis has been put on the practical part. Engineering education on signal processing has been put into practice over decades through the design and implementation of multi-level in-curriculum experiments, project-driven training, cross-disciplinary contest, and a whole-semester graduation project. Manifold tools and platforms have been adopted or established to enhance the diverse laboratory teaching of signal processing. These tools and platforms include hardware circuits, software tools, and hardware platforms based on embedded processors.