For Students by Students: Labware and Courseware Development

We have successfully implemented a program whereby students develop labware and courseware for other students. We have called this approach “For Students By Students or FSBS.” In this program students, as either a senior design or graduate level project design, prototype and implement laboratory equipment and courseware for use by other students. This has proven to be a very effective approach to provide for up-to-date laboratory labware and courseware in rapidly changing disciplines such as electrical and computer engineering on a limited budget. More importantly, participating students gain valuable real world experience in designing, prototyping, and delivering a system with accompanying support documentation. In this paper we review 10 successful projects that have been completed over the past decade using the FSBS approach. We then provide a step-by-step methodology to implement this program. We also provide a case study for replacing the lab trainer and labware for a microcontroller course based on the Freescale S12 microprocessor.