Labs

In the spring of 2021, I started looking for collaborators who were interested in research in undergraduate laboratories.  Through the power of professional networks, six of us began meeting to identify a project for the Strategic Instructional Innovation Program in the Academy for Excellence in Engineering Education (AE3) in the Grainger College of Engineering (GCoE) at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.  The first project we identified was to create a community of practice (CoP) of instructors of laboratory and design courses.  Since then, the community of practice has continued to grow and expand its impact.  

Read more about the Lab and Design CoP on their website.

Across higher education, there has been an increased emphasis on creating inclusive classroom experiences for students. However, these efforts have largely been focused on traditional lecture-based courses.  While some of the evidence-based practices of these initiatives apply to lab and design-based courses, there are several unique situations in these courses that would benefit from a different approach.  For example, lab-based courses generally have longer in-class periods that require extended focus; use unique tools, equipment and software; and are required to complete activities that are very different from traditional homework.  In design or project-based classes, much of the project work happens in unstructured time outside of the classroom where team dynamics cannot be observed by instructional staff.  In both lab and design-based courses, students interact with their peers and instructional staff in very different ways.  Broadly experiential learning (labs and projects) is an essential part of STEM education, therefore, if we aim to have a diverse group of students succeed in STEM, then we also need for them to be included and active participants in all aspects of their education.

In the spring of 2021, a group of faculty who taught lab and design courses came together to share lessons learned from remote classes.  We found that we could have benefited from a community of practice (CoP) to be able to share ideas and collaboratively solve issues in our courses as we continued to adapt to changes in higher education.  At the 2022 ASEE annual conference, we presented a paper that shared the process of forming the CoP and the first year of programming.  The full paper is available from ASEE.

The final results of my dissertation research about affordable and portable laboratory kits were published in Advances in Engineering Education in 2019. The full paper can be accessed from the AEE website.

At the 2017 Frontiers in Education (FIE) Conference, I published the results of a comparison of lab kits using the control systems laboratory framework (CSLF) that I published earlier this year in the IEEE Transactions on Education. The paper also includes a suggested process for using the CSLF in new laboratory development (see photo above).  The full paper can be accessed in the IEEE Xplore Digital Library.

At the 2017 Frontiers in Education (FIE) Conference, I published a paper about teaching assistants (TAs). The observations about the influence of TAs in the laboratory emerged from the laboratory equipment study that I conducted during my dissertation. Based on student comments during the original study, the TAs had an impact on the learning environment in the laboratory.   The full paper can be accessed in the IEEE Xplore Digital Library.

At the 2017 American Society of Engineering Education (ASEE) Annual Conference, one of my students published a paper about the success of a unique SWE event at Kettering University, Welding and Machining Day.  The paper explained how the event was organized and summarized the feedback from the participants.  Diane Peters, the faculty advisor, and I also co-authored the paper.  The full paper can be accessed from the ASEE website.

The technical details of my laboratory kit for control systems were published in the Raspberry Pi special edition of Electronics.  This article also includes the newly added Furuta Inverted Pendulum attachment for the kit.  The open access paper can be found on the Electronics website.

I created a video demonstration of my control systems laboratory kit to help expand the reach of the new possibilities of instructional laboratories with low-cost hardware.

At the 2015 IEEE Frontiers in Education conference, I presented the preliminary analysis of the quantitative data we collected about a laboratory kit during the 2014-2015 school year.  During both semesters, half of the GE 320 laboratory sections used our new kit (treatment) and the other half used the existing equipment (baseline).  In this preliminary analysis, we determined that we could not detect a difference in performance on exams between the treatment and baseline groups.  The full paper can be found on the IEEE Explore website.

At the 2015 American Control Conference (ACC), I presented a paper in the invited session on Controls Education.  In this paper, I included the technical details and code developed for the GE 320 laboratory kit.  The technical details include a bill of materials and circuit board diagrams.  The code includes s-function code and Simulink models used in the laboratories. The models used to 3D print other parts are available upon request. The full paper can be found on the IEEE Explore website.

A bring your own experiment (BYOE) is a special category of papers at the ASEE Annual Conference in the Division Experimentation and Lab-Oriented Studies.  In a BYOE paper the author describes how to develop equipment and/or a novel set of experiments.  At the 2015 ASEE Annual Conference, I published a BYOE paper about the GE 320 laboratory kit I developed and the experiments that can be performed with the kit.  During the conference, instead of a traditional paper presentation, I demonstrated an experiment with the kit in a science fair style session.  The full paper can be found on the ASEE PEER website.  

On October 23, I presented the first paper my advisor, Dr. R.S. Sreenivas, and I published on my research of affordable and portable laboratory kits for undergraduate controls education courses.  The paper and presentation were part of the ASME Dynamic Systems and Control Conference in San Antonio, Texas.  The slides from the presentation are included below and the full paper is available in the ASME Digital Collection. 

In order for the Raspberry Pi to read the motor's position from the potentiometer, the analog signal needs to be converted to a digital signal.  I selected an MCP3002 analog-to-digital converter (ADC) for this purpose.  The digital output from the MCP3002 can be read using the SPI or I2C protocols and the Raspberry Pi has built in drivers in the WiringPi libraries for both protocols.  I used SPI in the GE320 kit because the driver already existed in WiringPi, which made the implementation very easy.

The first phase of my dissertation research is to create a laboratory kit that can be used in the introduction to controls course in General Engineering (GE).  I have included a description of the course, the existing equipment, the contents of the kit, and a comparison of the laboratory exercises below.