Electric & Electronic Science and Technology Innovation Center

Foreword

TAs the fast increase of national economics and the implementation of the strategy of rejuvenating our country through science and education, the society have come to a consensus that innovation plays an enormous role in boosting economic growth and human talents progress. Therefore, how to fit in with the development of the country and create favorable environment for innovation talents and how to organize various practical activities to popularize and further innovative spirit has become the primary concern of current advanced educational reform.

Electric & Electronic Science and Technology Innovation Center of Huazhong University of Science and Technology (hereinafter shortened as the Center), which was founded in 2001, is the teaching base of the engineering foundation course Electric & Electronic (in 2004, passed the acceptance check of the National Ministry of Education and ranked as “Excellent”) and the major constituent of the national experiment teaching demonstration center of Electric & Electronic (which was among the 25 first-rated centers in 2006). The Center focuses its work on the development of the teaching base and the students’ various innovative activities of the demonstration center. It grows out of the “Little Red Hat” Household Appliance Maintenance team founded by the Telecommunication Department in 1990 and the “Extracurricular Science and Technology Center” which was founded in 1992. The Center relies on the two national key disciplines of the College of Electric and Electronic Engineering - Electrical Machinery & Electric Engineering and Power System & Its Automation, and the two grade-1 disciplines of the Department of Electronic and Communication Engineering, namely, Information & Telecommunication Engineering and Electronic Science and Technology. It takes “to provide opportunity for elites and let opportunity create masters” as its development notion, “to enhance practical capabilities and foster innovative spirit” as its goal of talents cultivation. The Center works on setting up fully-open innovative laboratories, providing serial practical courses and optional courses in electronic communication, organizing scientific research teams of students and applying for and implementing college students’ innovative research program. The Center participates in the contests of key disciplines in electronic communication and builds up the cultivation system of practice and innovation for the college students’ innovative base. The Center is committed to turning into an incubation center for top-notch innovative talents, an training center for national and international contests, and a demonstration center of scientific and technological innovative activities and teaching reform.

Ⅰ.Education notion

The traditional education pattern can not keep up with the development of the times and the progress of the society. Therefore, how to foster innovative talents who have a sense of the time has become a major concern that touches the development of science and technology of the country.

During the exploration and practice of many years, Electric & Electronic Science and Technology Innovation Center of Huazhong University of Science and Technology has established a set of education notions to train innovative talents which goes as follows:

1. To establish the sense of being elite. With the increasing popularity of higher education, if the students simply feel satisfied as college students and don’t have any awareness of the violent competition of society, they will not be able to meet the demands of the society and will feel lost after they graduate. Therefore, the Center should strengthen the students’ sense of crisis and cultivate their sense of being elite. The elites should have the following characteristics: having strong sense of social responsibility and being kindness, good at teamwork and willing to dedicate, studying efficiently and being active in practice, and good at solving problems creatively and exploiting new fields. In short, our students should have both personal integrity and ability.

2. To introduce standardized teaching. Traditional extracurricular teaching mode leaves much room to be improved. For example, the content to be studied is not systemized, the time for studying is not continuous and the supervising system is not well-established. The Center thinks extracurricular education should learn from the full-time teaching mode and be standardized, ordering and systemized. So we provide optional courses, organize lectures and summer training courses to turn separated extracurricular activities into a new type of education.

3. To highlight personalized training. In the Center, the students can choose the research projects provided by the Center or work out their own projects. The students can study according to the teaching plan or discuss with their supervisors to set up personalized plan.

4. To encourage autonomous learning. In the Center, the students are encouraged to learn to analyze and solve problems by themselves.

5. To emphasize quality education. The Center lays emphasis on the students’ cooperation spirit, professional ethics and humanism, sense of responsibility and integrity.

6. To emphasize professional theoretical knowledge. The students trained by the Center will be the main R & D, project managers and technical directors of enterprises, but not technicians. Therefore, the students should have solid foundational knowledge and profound theoretical foundations for future research and development and innovation.

Ⅱ. Education Measures

To train innovative talents, we should first change our educational notions and focus on developing the students’ innovative abilities, practical abilities and pioneering spirit. We should make great efforts to create favorable atmosphere for the students to carry out their creative ideas. Based on this knowledge, the Center mainly takes the following measures:

1. To standardize management. In order to ensure the sustainable development of the Center, we set down developing plan when the Center was newly established and perfect it in practice. The plan covers the orientation of the Center; the mid- and long-term plan; the training objective, form and steps of talents training; and rules and regulations. Special emphasis was laid on institutional improvement. The plan powerfully safeguards the integrated development of the Center.

2. To create open practice environment. The Center works out enrollment system, student management system, management system of equipment, units and books. All the resources are open to the students all day. The Center has bought a lot of laboratory apparatus and some special test instruments that the students can borrow as they need. The Center has subscribed to many newspapers and periodicals and bought many books. The Center also sets up a local area network. All this makes it possible for the students to have access to necessary information without going out of the laboratories. Picture 1 is an illustration of the books, units and equipment which are fully open to he students.

3. To prepare practice and teaching materials all-directionally. The Center works closely with the trainees, the cooperative laboratories and enterprises to obtain practice and teaching resources, such as funds, devices, equipment, technical training and contest rewards.

Ⅲ. Training courses

After many years of research and practice in training innovative talents out of class, the Center has accumulated a lot of training resources of electronic communication. While the university fully carries out reforms of school credits, the Center integrates and optimizes the training resources and develops a series of courses: “Fundamentals of Electric and Electronic Engineering I- IX”. The Center offers optional courses to the students. The main contents and time arrangement of the courses can be seen in Table 1.

Up to the first half year of 2008, the Center has offered 82 times of courses and totals 2829 school hours, with 6255 students attending the classes. Integrating out-of-class training into formal teaching system not only standardizes separated out-of-class training and promotes it into good order, but solves many problems used to obstruct the development of extracurricular activities, such as the calculation of teachers’ amount of work, payment and classroom. What’s more, the series of courses forms a platform for the daily training of the innovative base.

Table 1 Main Contents and Time Arrangement of the course “Fundamentals of Electric and Electronic Engineering I- IX”