IEEE Power Electronics Magazine - March 2021 - 16

teaching into a format with unlimited potential to engage students in exciting, absorbing, and challenging
ways. This format could be easily adapted to suit collective or individual needs in a manner not possible
through traditional textbooks.

Patents and Funding
After years of research, using my experience from
teaching power electronics modules online, my students and I designed a new platform to deliver highly
integrated, adaptive, interactive digital content for
technical and scientific digital books. Our work
resulted in 7 US patents. The novelty of the new educational technology lies in providing the students with
an unprecedented opportunity to try any numerical
solution, set any parameter value and unit, and
explore several solution techniques, theoretically and
graphically. The broad flexibility of the format is
designed to offer students unlimited combinations
and opportunities to experiment with innumerable
circuit solutions under different parameter values,
which is a paradigm shift in content delivery. The platform also allows students the opportunity to challenge their level of understanding by changing the difficulty level of an engineering problem. The multi-level solving simulator sparks the imagination of
students and helps build their confidence levels. The
designed interactive modules provide a systematic
solution to show how the answers were derived, and
how the concepts relate to real-world problems. The
interactive modules empower students to try all possible mathematical solutions and provide the opportunity to answer the " what if " question while studying.
Making this tool available online will provide an innovative method for interactive teaching and online
design testing. The next step to prove our patented
technology is to illustrate the benefit of the new
technology in a given engineering book and other
STEM books.
Having designed the new technology and secured
patents, seeking funding to illustrate the new technology was the next logical step. We believed, like every other engineering inventor, that technology is the
key to any business; and since our technically interactive ebook solution is a first-of-its-kind, we thought
venture capitalists would be eager to fund it. Not so
fast! VCs were clear: we needed to show a book prototype that ran on our patented platform. In order to
develop the platform, we needed at least one million
dollars since no commercial or open-source platform
on which to illustrate the technology existed. It was
a chicken and an egg challenge. We needed funding
to develop the platform, but in order to successfully
pitch the platform we needed interactive content to
illustrate the technology's capabilities. Either one
required funds to make the other possible. In the

IEEE POWER ELECTRONICS MAGAZINE

]March 2021

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IEEE Power Electronics Magazine - March 2021

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