2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

The need of options to ensure the quality of education, even outside educational institutions, is something that has intensified in the last 3 years due to the COVID-19 pandemic. This not only impacts theoretical disciplines, also engineering areas have struggled to facilitate students to perform the experiments necessary for their training. Several universities have initiated or increased efforts to mitigate the effects resulting from students taking electrical engineering classes from home without access to university laboratories. Thanks to this, several remote laboratories have been created, which allow students to experiment from their homes with real equipment that is in a real laboratory that they can visualize through a camera in real time. Other universities have been working on creating portable labs that students can take home and conduct experiments as if they were in the traditional laboratory. A review of the developments carried out in Latin America and the Caribbean will be presented about both laboratories.

We are particularly presenting the detailed process carried out by a group of researchers from a university in the Dominican Republic for the creation of a portable electrical engineering laboratory that incorporates all the necessary equipment. The creation of this lab emerged as an R + D + I project that was funded in the period 2018-2021 by the Ministry of Higher Education, Science and Technology (MESCyT) in collaboration with Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology (KAIST) and Korea International Cooperation Agency (KOICA) with a budget greater than US $ 103,000.00
Initially, the project was conceived for the creation of equipment that would complement or replace the equipment used in electrical/electronic laboratories, because in the Dominican Republic the cost of traditional equipment is a high investment that few educational institutions can manage to make. With the arrival of the pandemic, a redesign was carried out, becoming a portable laboratory that has all the required instruments, with a lower cost than the options already existing in the market and that students can transport in their backpacks. To date, it has received 2 capital injections of more than US$28,000.00 from banking and government institutions, and recently the research team has been approved more than US$200,000 to continue researching and developing this subject.
The cost of production is around US$250.00 and is expected to decrease it further. To date 3 teachers, 10 students and one company have participated in this project. A spin-off called LAB-VEE Educational TechMaker has been created for marketing and an LMS with didactic content that was implemented in 2021 by a school in the country that impacted more than 60 students. From this implementation, a study has been carried out to measure the level of learning of these students in comparison to others who studied in a traditional way. In 2022 with the return to face-to-face learning, a university in the country is incorporating LAB-VEE in its electricity and electronics laboratories, where a study is also being carried out to know its impact on the academic performance of students.