2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

The aim of this work is to present experiences in using engineering laboratories for teaching Physics. The Physics teacher team of an engineering educational institution in Brazil has been striving to align the subject with real-life situations experienced in engineering laboratories. These laboratories are rich in applied physics, and these applications can be the key to giving meaning, motivating, and engaging students in Physics course. The institution where this project is being developed has over a hundred laboratories, surpassing the number of traditional classrooms, and also has a research center that provides services to various sectors of society, conducting tests and research in Engineering. The challenge is: how to utilize these engineering laboratories in the teaching of Physics? When students enter an engineering course, they are eager to practice engineering from the start, and often feel unmotivated when faced with Physics that is not well contextualized within the course. With this need for contextualization in mind, coupled with teachers' awareness, the aim was to find a set of experiences that would put students in contact with the Physics found in engineering laboratories. To develop this proposal, the team began prospecting in the institution's laboratories, aiming to identify processes and phenomena that could be studied from the perspective of Physics concepts and laws. Five laboratories were selected to start the project: Materials Resistance, Baja Motor, Fab Lab, Production Line in the Digital Manufacturing Laboratory, and the Robotics Laboratory. As approximately 300 students enroll each year, the proposal is for student teams to work in one of the school's laboratories. With this division, about 60 students would be involved in each chosen laboratory as the host laboratory. In the classroom, each class is composed of a maximum of six teams of up to five students, ensuring that each team in each class would work in one of the host engineering laboratories. Each team should collect data in the host laboratory, describe the process, identify the Physics concepts involved in modeling the phenomenon, present collected data and achieved results, highlighting potential engineering applications. Furthermore, each team should prepare a short video of no more than seven minutes, showing the phenomenon in the host laboratory and reporting on the work done. This video will complement the presentation each team will give at the end of the semester to the entire class, ensuring the sharing of experiences with other students. To assess learning in this project, students will take a pre-test and a post-test on the concepts and physical modeling related to the phenomenon studied in the host laboratory. Additionally, a questionnaire will be administered to gauge students' and teachers' perceptions of the work proposal. The theoretical foundation of this project is Ausubel's meaningful learning, which fosters the creation of a cognitive structure that gives meaning to new knowledge. The purpose of presenting this work at the conference is to share the structure of this project and the initial results achieved.