2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

The learning enhancement brought on by hands-on experience is a well-established principle. For most engineering classes, laboratory (lab) experiments make an integral part of the curriculum. In engineering education, we place a lot of significance on student participation in the labs but we seldom make students part of the curriculum and lab development. The skill of creating is the highest step of learning in Bloom’s taxonomy. Through active involvement in lab development, students gain higher levels of learning and understanding. It is also well established that a good lab design involves open-ended design to provide sufficient challenge to students in order for them to achieve cognitive learning and practical skills. Our student-developed labs provide open-ended design opportunities to prompt questioning and higher-level evaluation of the knowledge acquired in class.

The student who led this lab design and development effort completed this work through the Undergraduate Research and Creative Activities program at our institution She started the laboratory development and experiment designs while enrolled in the engineering electromagnetics course designed for third-year students. The following five labs were developed:
1. Voltage Standing wave ratio (VSWR)
2. Time Domain Reflectometry (TDR) with different types of loads (open circuit, short circuit, load match, load undermatch, load overmatch)
3. One-way and round-trip propagation delay
4. Distributed versus Lumped circuits
5. Electromagnetic Compatibility
We propose to present the supervised student-led approach to the design and development of undergraduate laboratories. The student designer made significant contributions to the lab design and lab manual documentation by bringing in an important perspective on how students receive, perceive, and process information. For each lab developed, the student designer designed two sets of lab manuals – one for the lab instructor and one for the students. The students’ lab manuals limit the detailed information about the analysis of a particular circuit but instead include question prompts to aid student learning by evaluating. To date, we have crafted five comprehensive lab sets, and our ongoing efforts are dedicated to developing additional sets. We have successfully evaluated two of these labs, collecting valuable feedback from students regarding their engagement and perceived improvement in comprehending the associated concepts. By the time we submit a full paper, we will be able to offer the full set of labs and include the survey data in our paper.