Free ticketed event
Introductory general engineering courses such as University of Florida’s EGS1006 “Introduction to Engineering” can be successfully infused with hands-on lab activities to increase student engagement, interest, and learning. Kits can be deployed for in-person, hybrid, and all-online instruction. Workshop attendees will receive a Gatorkits Lab™ EGS1006 Interactive Lab Kit to use during the workshop. Using their kits, attendees will work through a simulated remote learner experience in which they 1) set up an experiment, 2) collect and record data, 3) analyze data, and 4) compare and discuss results with peers. Pedagogically valuable features differentiating Gatorkits Lab™ kits from conventional brick-and-mortar teaching labs will be highlighted including 1) the benefit of students assembling an apparatus to independently execute experimental investigations and 2) the importance of theory/experiment agreement when demonstrating phenomena.
Infrastructural and institutional benefits of this approach will also be illuminated including 1) enabling institutions to inexpensively reach and serve remote learners; 2) providing new instructional options for existing students, e.g. learning asynchronously by performing experiments off-campus; 3) being upwardly/downwardly scalable to match class size variations without need to add/remove infrastructure or teaching staff; 4) eliminating need to maintain physical teaching lab spaces; and 5) resilience to continue hands-on instruction if in-person classes are shuttered – for example by a pandemic.
Equipped with this workshop experience, attendees will be prepared to implement kit-based introductory engineering laboratory experiments in courses at their home institutions.
Alexander D. Lacerna (B.S. ME, Minor EE, Spring 2022) is a current M.S. student in Mechanical Engineering. He appreciates the integration of mechanical design with circuitry and software to form fully functioning prototypes, and is utilizing this skillset in the development of an interactive lab kit currently deployed in the undergraduate course EGS1006, Introduction to Engineering.