MAKER: Public Engineering: Informal Interactive Video and Electronic Poster Hallway Learning Experience

Through class projects and assignments, students create a wide range of interesting content. How can faculty use the student video and poster projects after the semester is over? This project is focused on the production of a system that can be used in the hallway to allow students to interact and learn from videos and electronic posters. The term public engineering was chosen to be analogous to the field of public history as the aim here is educate the public about engineering topics. This public engineering display is primary made up of a PC running windows and 32-inch LCD TV. The computer is surplus from a student computer lab upgrade, and the TV/Display was mounted to a wall in an engineering academic building. A hole was drilled in the wall to connect the TV monitor to the computer sitting in the room behind the display. A metal control box was built and mounted to the wall below the display that houses arcade control buttons and an Ultimarc Mini-PAC control board. Using the LabVIEW programing language, an application was built that allow the user’s pressing of the arcade buttons to emulate keyboard strokes. The application then uses that information to log the user’s answers to content questions or their requests for new content in Excel files. LabVIEW displays images of the posters or makes calls to Active X controls to play the videos. The program is setup to read file folders and to randomly select which content is displayed. As such, new content can be added without changing the program by simply adding new files to the appropriate folders. This paper will describe the construction of this interactive display to allow others to replicate the experience. A laptop-based version of the display system will be brought to the conference for demonstration purposes.