2021 W.S. "Pete" White Award
Dean's Award for Excellence
W.S. "Pete" White Award for Innovation in Engineering Education
Cameron Patterson
Associate Professor, Bradley Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
- Treating an initial software course solely as an introduction to programming language X can be as ineffective as introducing a branch of mathematics by focusing only on the notation. There also needs to be some accompanying insight, intuition and narrative. Cameron Patterson has taken a more innovative approach to provide his students a creative way to learn. To this end, any major topic is first introduced with a doodle that captures a sequence of steps or updates to values and datasets. The final team-based, open-ended project makes the point that programming is not necessarily a solitary activity turning someone else’s specification into code.
- Computer engineering increasingly focuses on cyber-physical and autonomous systems. ECE 2514's four projects give a preview of this through computer interaction with virtual environments and finally the physical world. Cameron Patterson uses this technology to be innovative in his students’ learning. In Fall 2020 for example, the first two projects extracted beat times from chosen music in order to choreograph a virtual object’s motion with the soundtrack. The last two projects passed and executed a custom flight plan language that has the Tello indoor drone, safely enclosed in a protective cage, navigating a c3-D environment in a manner selected by the student team.
- Cameron Patterson holds 17 patents related to field-programmable gate arrays, received an Industrial Research Fellowship Award from NSERC, and his Ph.D. work was recognized by Don Knuth and cited in The Art of Computer Programming, the seminal work on algorithmics.