The Implementation Of A Classroom Laboratory Paradigm

This paper describes a novel classroom design used in the Systems Engineering department at the United States Naval Academy to more strongly couple the classroom and laboratory experiences for undergraduate systems engineering students. The Systems Engineering department has replaced two roughly equally sized rooms dedicated separately as a laboratory and a classroom with one lab-classroom equal to roughly one and a half times the size of the pre-renovation rooms. Designed for roughly twenty students, the lab-classroom are designed to integrate coursespecific engineering laboratory equipment with the traditional lecture environment. The coupling of the physical environments serves to blur the distinction between formerly disparate events including: lecture, computer modeling and simulation, and hardware implementation. Labclassroom can be dedicated to specific disciplines within the major such as control systems, robotics, environmental engineering, communications, and microprocessors. In addition, our labclassroom are equipped with a variety of multimedia tools to facilitate student learning. For example, now one single room houses traditional desks, chalk boards, multimedia equipment, as well as ten robotic workstations including computers and vision systems. The paper discusses several of the lab-classroom activities that this new physical layout enables as well as faculty and student response.