2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This paper presents how the serious challenges in teaching laboratory courses during the COVID pandemic and transition to an online mode of instruction were overcome by innovation to not only provide the students with equitable infrastructure for doing all the required projects and hands-on experiments remotely but also used as a learning opportunity to provide students with more insight into the setup, design, functionality, and purpose of lab equipment. While in typical academic years and in the normal (in-person) mode of operation, the sophomore students in this course learned to use the laboratory equipment for doing projects and lab experiments, in this course students additionally learned to build a test-board that served as the needed infrastructure.

Students spent the first two weeks of the semester learning about and experimenting with the basic components such as LEDs and different types of switches, then used them to build and then test a solid test-board that substituted the typical training boards in digital logic laboratories. Students were provided with tutorials illustrated by pictures and step-by-step directions and also several short videos that in a few minutes demonstrated the assembly and wiring processes. The test-board had many nice details such as a power-on indicator to let the user know it is receiving power. It had a section with sliding switches to create logic values to be applied to the inputs of the chips and also a logic indicator section for reading the outputs of the chips. As a requirement students had to carefully examine and verify the functionality of each section and module on the test-boards before they could use them in the following experiments. After passing the required tests, each test-board was integrated with one or more unpopulated breadboards ready to be used in standard course experiments.

Building the test-board proved to have many advantages over ad hoc methods of doing digital logic experiments that made use of some of the same parts on the board: (1) The test-board was built once and used throughout the semester, so it saved students significant time in their experiments. In ad hoc methods, students need to add parts (e.g. switches for applying logic values to the inputs of the chips, and LEDs for reading the outputs) during each experiment. (2) After building the test-board, students could focus on the experiments and circuits without worrying about the infrastructure needed for each experiment. (3) The debug of test-board (infrastructure) was separated from the debug of the main circuit and students could deal with them separately. As an example, the addition of power-on indicator, could immediately signal one of the most common problems in the experiments, when one of the connections from the power supply to the boards was disconnected. (4) The possibility of errors in the test logic was significantly reduced, and the debugging of the test-board was rarely required. (5) In general, the organized and methodic approach led to effective and efficient experiments, and also served as a model to think creatively and methodically for solving engineering problems. Overall, the design and use of the test-board proved instrumental in the successful remote delivery of our digital laboratory course