Interactive ECE 210 visuals

LLMs as rapid prototyping tools

Rainer Engelken
ECE Faculty Retreat · May 7, 2026

The bottleneck

the material is strong
the textbook is not interactive
students struggle to connect
formalism, intuition, and physical meaning

Examples

Fourier series
Fourier series → Fourier transform
convolution
s-plane poles → time-domain behavior

A simple prompt

“Make an awesome web applet based on HTML and Javascript that explains complex numbers for my ECE210 students ‘analog signal processing’. Make it interactive, and pedagogically useful. For context, I am attaching the slides of today’s lecture.”

Workflow

lecture slides + prompt
→ prototype
→ simplify
→ screenshot + rerun if needed
→ audit the math
→ publish as supplementary material

Used: ChatGPT + Gemini

Caveats

not a replacement for study
simple beats overloaded
polished does not mean correct
the instructor keeps intellectual ownership

Takeaway

AI helps me build better teaching visuals quickly.

But correctness, pedagogy, and responsibility stay with us.

Thanks: Cory Snyder · Juan Alvarez · Craig Shultz · Olga Mironenko · Erhan Kudeki · Ivan Abraham