Instructional Development And Assessment Of A Task Oriented Senior Level Data Acquisition Project In A Simulated Business Environment

Problem-based learning experiences give technology students a chance to construct their own knowledge base and implement it in an actual application. Some students excel when given this freedom, while others flounder and fail. One reason students struggle is they are accustomed to procedural labs and small-scale analysis problems. They lack experience in applying technical knowledge to open-ended problems. This paper presents the instructional, hardware, and software designs for a ten-week senior level control and data acquisition project that transitions students from small-scale procedural laboratory experiments and individual design tasks to multi-task projects that require coordinated design efforts. The instructional design simulates a business environment where a design team must divide work, complete individual tasks, and integrate separate subsystems to successfully complete a project. To promote the importance of clear written technical communication in a business setting, students report their progress and results in memo form. They then utilize the results of other design team members to produce final technical reports covering the entire project design. This technique uses both instructor and peer evaluations to assess student performance. Based on eight years of student participation, this paper presents the strengths weaknesses of the instructional design.