Teaching of Fourier series expansions in undergraduate education

Abstract

Here we discuss the teaching of Fourier series concepts in connection with undergraduate Electrical Engineering education. We briefly review some of the basic Fourier series theory, and present an Android application that has been found useful in this context. As expected, the application has an easy-to-use, friendly interface, and can be viewed as a tool to help undergraduate students test and assess the Fourier series expansions on a typical set of signals, whose analytical Fourier series coefficients were found during the theoretical lectures. Additionally, students can also control the total approximation error and the number of terms/harmonics used in the expansion. It seems that our students prefer this Android application to the traditional applet fashioned web-based applications.