Learning By Doing And Communications Within A Process Control Class

Providing realistic experiences for engineering students is complicated by a number of factors including a lack of equipment, technician support, and meaningful communication experiences to name a few. To overcome the first two factors computer simulations have been used but these are often lacking in the fullness of details that real systems provide. Meaningful communications are also difficult if there are no consequences tied to the effectiveness of the communication. Over the past four years we have been examining a number of approaches for using remotely located experiments to overcome these difficulties. More recently we have restructured our approach to also emphasize communications skills. To provide the learning-by-doing experience we used the Green Engineering theme experiments of the on-line laboratory facilities at UTC. To emphasize the communications aspect, WSU students were paired with other WSU students for conducting experiments. By working with their classmates peer pressure is brought to bear to encourage full participation by all students in the activity. The assignments divided into three parts: a data acquisition step, where the student had to request tests that characterized the system, a data analysis task, using data from the acquisition step, and a performance step, where the student had to instruct another student in order to obtain a specified performance for their system. While student’s prefer the easy route most of the students in this year’s group learned valuable lessons beyond just process control. It would appear that this is one of those situations where you may not like the approach but you realize that in the end it is good for you.