Schedules

• If you are studying electric circuits as a complete subject (rather than just grabbing topics at random), you might consider using a schedule of some of some sort. The schedules below were used by G. Tuttle when teaching EE 201 at ISU.
• The first is a simple ordered list of topics. To use it, start at the top and work your way to the bottom. For each topic, read the notes and do enough practice problems until you are sure that you know what you are doing. If you have time and inclination, you can try doing some of the homework problems. If you have access to lab equipment, you can try some of the lab exercises.
• The second is a traditional week-by-week syllabus for a typical 16-week semester and gives more structured approach. This schedule is very similar to what was used for EE 201.

EE 201 in three acts:

Act I - Basics concepts and analysis techniques

• charge/current/voltage
• Energy/Power
• Sources & resistors
• Kirchoff's Laws
• Sinusoids & RMS
• Series & parallel combinations
• Voltage and current dividers
• Source transformations
• Node-voltage method
• Mesh-current method
• Superposition
• SPICE

Act II - Equivalent circuits and a touch of electronics

• Dependent sources
• Thevenin / Norton equivalent circuits
• Two-port equivalent circuits
• Amplifiers
• Feedback
• Op amps
• Diodes

Act III - Capacitor, inductors, transients, and sinusoids

• Capacitors
• Inductors
• RC transients
• RL transients
• Complex numbers and math
• RLC transients
• AC circuits - the hard way
• AC circuits - the complex way
• AC circuits - the impedance way
• Transformers
• Rectifiers
• Resonance
• AC power

A day-by-day syllabus
Below is a suggested schedule for a standard 16-week semester (15 weeks of class + a finals week). This probably doesn't exactly match with any specific schedule that I ever used, but most semesters were similar to this. When I first started teaching EE 201, I usually put the diodes topics at the very end but found later that the everything fit together better if diodes were introduced after op amps.

A typical lecture period would have 35 - 40 minutes of lecture (aka nap time). On most days, there would be a 10-minute, in-class quiz at the end of the period. Five or six homework problems were assigned most weeks. Two-person lab groups met weekly with written reports submitted for each lab exercise.