ECE210 with CS225
Relevant Course Reviews:
Who should take them?
Both courses are required for CompE majors, whereas ECE210 is required for EEs and some choose to take CS225 as an advanced core elective and/or for a CS minor. Both courses are generally taken sophomore year, and they do not relate very much. ECE210 focuses on circuit analysis concepts and basics of signal processing such as frequency response, Fourier transforms, and convolution, whereas CS225 focuses on how to store data using data structures such as stacks, queues, and trees and is taught using C++.
Workload:
In terms of coursework, ECE210 has a weekly homework assignment, biweekly labs starting halfway through the semester, 3 midterms, and a final. Homework assignments usually contain around 5-7 problems that need to be solved. For labs, there is usually a 2-page prelab and then a 4-page lab report alongside the required circuit construction. One can expect to spend around 3-6 hours on these assignments. Homework and exams are the main focus of the course, and so will be what most students dedicate their time and effort to.
Meanwhile, CS225 has 6 MPs occuring biweekly, a weekly lab, 6 exams, and a final. MPs are usually divided into 2 parts, where the first part can be completed a week early for extra credit, while the whole MP is due all at once after the 2 weeks are up. Weekly labs can usually be done during the lab sections and are similar in length to ECE220 MPs, while the MPs are usually much larger in scale. One can expect to spend around 10-15 hours per week on these assignments. There is also an optional group-based final project for extra credit, which some students may choose to pursue for various reasons. While the course has 6 exams, they are emphasized far less than the MPs as the goal of the class is to teach how data structures are implemented and used, so the exams end up being far less stressful than most other courses.
Recommendation:
Yes, taking these two courses together is very much doable. Since these two courses are not related, they can be and commonly are taken together, especially by CompE students who took ECE110 and ECE220 together.
Note that both ECE210 and CS225 can be time sinks, especially if one is taking them with other technicals such as MATH285, PHYS213, and PHYS214. If one is wary of taking these two classes together, consider that while doing so can be daunting, it might be even worse to take them alongside harder technicals such as ECE391 or ECE385 instead.