In the recent 6th Zhejiang Provincial University Teaching Innovation Competition, Associate Professor Li Yubo received the Grand Award in the provincial-level competition, standing out among 239 participating teams from across the province. His Digital Systems course, recognized for its systematic teaching reconfiguration and intensive hands-on training approach, has become a representative model for foundational curriculum reform in new engineering education.
Digital Systems is a core foundational course for first-year Electronic Science and Technology undergraduates. In recent years, the course has been recognized as a provincial first-class offline course and a provincial model curriculum for ideological and political education in the curriculum. One key textbook developed for the course has been designated as a key provincial textbook. The teaching methodology has been adopted by multiple universities nationwide, reaching over 10,000 students.
As the course leader, Associate Professor Li has long focused on talent cultivation model restructuring for new engineering education, developing a teaching philosophy centered on ”mechanism tracing, progressive challenges, and chip-centered education.“ The course emphasizes moving beyond ”how to implement a function“ toward understanding the underlying physical principles of logic devices and system behavior, including timing mechanisms, interface constraints, and system collaboration. The ”pocket experiment board“ developed by the team extends teaching beyond traditional labs to all learning scenarios, breaking temporal and spatial constraints in learning. The “multi-board cascade“ experiment system transforms key knowledge points—including state machines, interface matching, and timing synchronization—into cross-module collaborative tasks. The project-based learning system incorporates real engineering case studies including DeepSeek architecture and Deep Robotics robotic dogs. The course builds a stepped growth pathway from ”foundational experiments → system design → advanced challenges → research competitions,“ and X-Lab, an interdisciplinary practice platform initiated as a founding mentor by Professor Li, bridges the gap between coursework, research training, and industrial practice.
The Teaching Innovation Competition consists of two stages: online review and on-site review, comprehensively evaluating teaching philosophy innovation, classroom practice effectiveness, and talent cultivation quality. The Digital Systems course exemplifies the paradigm shift in new engineering education reform from ”knowledge transmission“ toward ”competency development,“ offering a replicable and scalable model for high-level talent cultivation.
