Lab In A Box: The Development Of Materials To Support Independent Experimentation On Concepts From Circuits

A project known as Lab-in-a-Box (LiaB) was developed in 2004 as one of the outcomes of a department- level reform within the Bradley Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) at Virginia Tech, addressing a need that was identified through student and employer surveys for concrete examples of fundamental concepts in electrical engineering. LiaB is a set of ‘hands-on’ exercises in which students design, build, and test at home various d.c. and a.c. circuits using an inexpensive electronics kit, digital multimeter, and a software oscilloscope and, thus, has not require significant resources to implement. The inclusion of LiaB in our ECE curriculum has received overwhelmingly positive comments from the students as well as from faculty members who have used the kits for projects in upper division courses that have been traditionally lecture-based with no lab component and has been adopted by three community colleges. The aim of the first set of experiments that are under development, funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation, is to reinforce abstract concepts on first-order and second- order RLC circuits introduced in the companion circuits lecture course. The students construct circuits with physical components rather than symbolic parts in PSpice and determine the time-varying voltage drops and currents in the circuit by direct measurement rather than by plugging values into their calculators. Experiments enable students to explore how the component tolerances, the initial state of the capacitor and/or inductor, and the frequency response of the circuit affects the output signal. An approach to integrate evaluation and assessment is being undertaken, where methods to measure the educational outcomes are considered concurrently with the development of the learning materials. A description of our pedagogical approach to the development of these learning materials and the integration of evaluation and assessment metrics will be described.