2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

The Douglas A. Mercer ’77 Innovation and Exploration Laboratory, known as the Mercer XLab, is an educational “third place” that provides open access to electronic instrumentation, electronic parts (both traditional and cutting-edge), student-led technical support, technician support, a tenured, research-active engineering faculty member in leadership, and curated educational modules to foster a growing learning ecosystem. It provides a dedicated, open-access space to build innovations, find collaborations, share technical tools, and aggregate results from the learning community to multiply the impact of innovators. The Mercer XLab opened its doors in September 2024 and is rapidly growing into a prototype of the new wave of engineering education, one that is built on diversity of thought and the fluid exploration of learning approaches from pedagogy (dependent learning) to andragogy (independent, self-directed learning), toward its final stage, heutagogy (interdependent, self-directed learning). The progression through learning approaches requires dedicated time and a variety of tools, along with supporting resources, that are readily available to students. Unlike conventional learning in highly structured classrooms, where tools and experimental details are often pre-selected for students, improvisational learning incorporates the use of any instrument at any time to play with concepts, interconnecting them in unique ways that are customized to the user. Improvisational engineering incorporates design thinking, student agency, creativity, practice using engineering judgment, and interconnecting core concepts through assessments of fundamental knowledge in hands-on laboratory experiences.
This study focuses on how experimental measurement tools, their size, cost, and ease of use, affect the students’ path from learning dependence in pedagogy to self-directed learning andragogy and heutagogy. It compares stand-alone benchtop equipment available in the Mercer XLab to personal instrumentation, such as the Analog Discovery Board and ADALM2000 (M2K) board. The work is facilitated by collaboration between the Science and Technology Studies (STS) department in the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Science and the Electrical, Computer, and Systems (ECSE) Engineering department in the School of Engineering. PhD students from each department expanded their research interests to include this exploration toward improvisational engineering education. The STS PhD student’s PhD thesis, “Producing Music, Producing Culture,” is a direct analogy to this study. His research treats the Music Production Center (MPC) as personal instrumentation for music and recording equipment in traditional music studio as benchtop equipment in the Mercer XLab. Thus, the foundation of his thesis, considering “technology of stylization” as a technical framework and methodology for spontaneous creative practices, is analyzed for heutagogical study in the hands-on, ECSE lab context. This study compares the confidence and competence of students using personal instrumentation with those using benchtop equipment in the Mercer XLab for the second-year Electric Circuits (ECSE-2010) course during the Spring 2025 semester. Furthermore, a comparison is made between students’ preferences for Alpha (Traditional) labs and Omega (Design) Labs regarding both benchtop and personal instrumentation usage. Omega Labs, an example of improvisational engineering, requires risk, engineering judgment, iteration, and creativity and thus reflect the effect of factors such as instrumentation availability, personnel support, ease of use, measurement limitation, and portability on creative risk. Finally, qualitative comments are summarized for students that participated in interviews throughout the Spring 2025 semester.