Teaching Introductory Electrical Engineering Course to CS Students in a Russian University

This article is about the author’s experience with developing and teaching an introductory electrical engineering course for students of Faculty (department) of Information Technology of a Russian university. The curriculum of this department conforms to typical computer science curricula of US engineering schools with a noticeable omission of comparable electrical engineering courses. When developing the course, I did my best to pay attention to learning preferences of the department’s student body. I also hoped to contribute to a degree to meeting labor market demands for developers of electrical engineering CAD software. As for inspiration, I was enchanted with ideas of the Mead & Conway revolution, albeit indirectly related to my enterprise.

💡 Research Summary

The paper reports on the author’s experience designing and teaching an introductory electrical engineering (EE) course for first‑year Computer Science (CS) students at the Faculty of Information Technology of a Russian university. The department’s curriculum mirrors typical US CS programs but completely lacks EE courses, creating a gap for students who might later work on EE CAD tools or hardware‑related software. To address this, the author created a “Analog Electronics” module that integrates basic circuit theory, semiconductor devices, digital logic, and signal processing into the existing CS curriculum.

The course was limited to one semester (68 lecture hours plus 34 hours of self‑study) and was structured as a self‑contained module that nevertheless fits into the broader program without “orphaning” the material. Teaching methods combined traditional lectures with extensive use of circuit simulators (OrCAD, SPICE) on classroom PCs, because a physical electronics lab was unavailable. The author also borrowed pedagogical ideas from MIT’s 6.002 course, emphasizing digital abstraction and logical design, and from Agarwal and Lang’s circuit‑simulation‑based approach. Programming languages (C++, C#, Java) were used alongside the simulators to illustrate the link between software development and hardware design.

Key findings include: (1) students responded positively to the integration of simulation tools, which allowed rapid experimentation without a lab; (2) however, reliance on simulation alone limited students’ development of intuition about real components and semiconductor physics; (3) the course struggled to achieve seamless curricular integration, often feeling like an add‑on rather than a core component of the CS program; and (4) the lack of hands‑on hardware work reduced the perceived relevance for future hardware‑oriented careers.

The author concludes that a successful EE introductory course for CS majors must balance simulation with physical experimentation, embed EE concepts across multiple CS courses, and provide project‑based tasks that mirror industry practices in CAD/EDA tool development. Institutional support for laboratory resources and curriculum redesign is essential to close the gap between CS and EE education and to produce graduates capable of contributing to both software and hardware domains.