Building a guitar amplifier: Accessible, engaging, and project-based audio instruction for students of all academic backgrounds

A challenge in designing first-year engineering curriculum is meeting the needs of a group of students with diverse academic backgrounds. Educators in the field of audio and acoustical engineering are often tasked with simultaneously preparing majors to be successful in their subsequent coursework while delivering a course that is both accessible to and exciting for all students. At the University of Rochester, we offer a survey course that introduces students to fundamental concepts in acoustics, signals, and audio electronics in which we leverage students’ existing experiences with sound and music in a project-based environment. Students complete a series of laboratory exercises where they interact with the science of audio by building a guitar amplifier circuit from scratch. Analyzing a schematic, soldering components, solving equations, seeing waveforms, and HEARING the results of their work, allows all students to engage in the content more deeply than any of these activities in isolation. In this presentation, we will share the specifics of our approach, and provide open-source curriculum in the form of lab manuals, supporting files, and sample PCBs.