ECE 2630

This class is tough but doable. You don’t have to attend lectures and can watch recordings instead. There are ample TA and instructor office hours for helping with the 2-3 assignments due each week. My biggest advice for this class is for the midterm and final DO THE RELEASED PROBLEM SET IN ADVANCE! Barnes releases half the test (the hard questions) in advance just with placeholders instead numerical values for example for resistors etc. You should solve these in terms of the variables in advance so u just have to plug in stuff in advance. I can’t tell you how many people learned this the hard way and failed the midterm. Luckily Barnes allows for test corrections. Additionally Barnes is a cool dude in general. Also definitely go to class on test review days since he gives out extra credit for attending those.

Barnes is an incredible professor and really wants the best for his students. Classes are structured where the first half is lecture and the second half is time to do lab/hw. The main bulk of the assignments in the course are labs but every now and then there will be an individual homework assignment. That being said this class is a lot of work with a good amount of weeks having three labs due in the same week. Your lab group(groups of 3) will make or break your experience. That being said, the labs aren’t too hard and there are a lot of opportunities to get help. Barnes has office hours Monday through Friday and there are plenty of TA’s who have office hours, and you can get help during the second half of class(not to mention that Barnes is incredibly responsive on Piazza). My advice is to not procrastinate on the labs because they do take a lot of time sometimes. Also, I would recommend practicing building circuits on the breadboard for the first couple of labs because he doesn’t really cover how to work with a breadboard. There are also exams in this class but Barnes gives you the free response questions ahead of time without any specific numbers and you can ask him for help before the exam. All in all, I would definitely recommend Barnes if he teaches this class.

Professor Barnes is an incredible teacher who truly wants you to do your best in the class as long as you're willing to put in the effort. He always made himself available to answer questions about the weekly group projects, even Zooming with my group on a Friday night an hour before the assignment was due and walking us through the steps.
The exams are mostly problem questions with varying ranges of difficulty, but he basically gives you the 4-6 hardest problems a week before each exam so you can work through how to solve them (but without any of the specific numbers).

Just manage your time well in this class and don't be afraid to go to Barnes' Zoom OH and you can do well. Also, I would recommend going to the in-person weekly studio lectures if you are in Charlottesville and able to get there. Even though mine was at 9 am it was still completely worth it.

Great Professor, he will answer to your questions no matter what. He is very knowledgeable, its incredible how fast he can know what the problem is from just a few glimpses to a circuit.

As for the class, we get to work with a group of 3 people throughout the semester, and we have to do homeworks that have analytical, numerical, and experimental components to them. My advice would be to create a document at the beginning of the semester, which states the jobs each person will have for each homework. Unfortunately, the class doesn't do this you! I was stuck with the same job for a couple of weeks because of this

Also, don't let a single group member decide everything! It's better to have a democracy instead of a monarchy

As for the exams, you are given a range(2-3 days) to take them. He gave a study guide before every exam, which was basically the exam.

#tCF2020

Professor Barnes was an amazing teacher for this class that really made Fun 1 an enjoyable experience. It is very obvious that he cares a lot about his students, and he always does a great job at explaining the material and being approachable. I can't recommend him highly enough.