Re Engaging Engineering Students In Hands On Education

This paper presents the technologies and implementation activities that are under development to re-engage students in “hands-on”, in and out of class exploration, experimentation and design to aid students’ understanding of the “big ideas” in electrical engineering. It describes (while the presentation will demonstrate) the Mobile Laboratory hardware and software (developed by Rensselaer) which, when connected to the PC via a USB port, provides similar functionality to an oscilloscope (with a full 50KHz bandwidth), 2 function generators, a multimeter and bipolar power supplies (for less than the cost of a typical textbook – approximately $80). With the advent of this mobile instrumentation studio PC-based laboratory, many instrumentation-based course offerings can now be held in normal classrooms rather than in specially outfitted facilities. In addition, students are asked to perform hands-on experiments outside of the classroom anywhere/anytime, thus facilitating new opportunities for them to “tinker,” to gain valuable insight through practical experience and to rekindle the passion for solving problems – potentially attracting/retaining a significantly larger fraction of the best students.