Continuous developments in the electronics industry have led to constantly changing career roles and graduate skills requirements. Students in the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China (UESTC) have complained that numerous courses in electronic engineering are heavily focused on theoretical knowledge that is disconnected from the needs of the industry. Thus, in an effort toward delivering student-centered educational programmes that meet the needs of the industry, this article introduces an innovative course that was developed using the project-based learning (PBL) method and situated in the electronic engineering undergraduate programme at UESTC. Since real-world engineering projects require teams to collaborate on ill-defined problems, we focused this innovative course on developing professional and technical skills, drawing from a range of more typical electronic engineering courses. We provide full details of two projects that were created for this PBL approach and evaluate them as practice examples that demonstrate the impact of this practical pedagogic innovation in UESTC. According to our evaluation, completed by all 40 of our enrolled students, our innovative course based on interdisciplinary PBL exercises demonstrated a significant improvement in student satisfaction and 65% of students preferred the interdisciplinary PBL course in comparison to traditional lecture-based courses.

Hall Magnetic sensors for particles detection have been explored over the past decades. It has been mentioned that the detection has the potential in the applications of biomedicine and environmental monitor. In biomedicine, numerical researches of Hall sensor have been achieved for detecting bio-markers magnetic nanoparticles (MNPs). On the contrary, Hall sensor for environmental monitor is seldom investigated. This paper carries out a pioneering investigation on Hall sensors for air quality detection. A modelling base on finite element method (FEM) software COMSOL is established to quantify the ability of Hall sensors in the measurement of micrometer-sized magnetite particles distributed in the air. Meanwhile, as the development of environmental magnetism in recent years, the modelling has the potential to provide the first protype of portable sensors for the detection of microsized magnetite particles in the air in the future.