The atmosphere of the lab was highly informal. The television sets were on during the viewing of the introductory videos and during the user activities for the videocamera/VCR. Similarly the stereo was playing for many of the required compact disc player exercises, and most groups continued to play the radio or their personal CDs while executing the other CD activities. Except for oral presentations, there was no formal time schedule, thus giving the student teams time to tinker, talk, and think at their own pace. This laboratory environment incorporated several desired characteristics of an integrated learning environment, including collaborative learning, hands-on experience, design motivation, and frequent, informal student-faculty interactions.
A. Collaborative Learning
Students worked in teams of two or three during our first and second offerings of the laboratory, respectively. Studies of cooperative laboratory experiences show such small groups to be more effective than larger groups (24). In two-person groups, students usually don't move on to the next task until both individuals have mastered the first step, unlike larger groups where the shift occurs once the majority of the members understand. Three-person groups can avoid deadlocks and have a mediator, if needed. Within each team, students divided the assigned tasks and worked together in whatever manner they found best, as long as each team member shared equally in the amount of work done and presented.
B. Hands-On Experience
"Learning by doing" operations encourage development of curiosity, analytical proficiency, and manual dexterity, three desirable characteristics of an engineer. These qualities should be enhanced through this new laboratory course. Students are encouraged to take apart and explore each of the products or processes as deeply as desired, keeping in mind any safety considerations that go along with these activities (i.e., safety glasses worn at all times, no live circuitry in 'take-apart' units, etc.) Future lab offerings will attempt to have several devices, rather than a single, take-apart unit for each team, to allow maximum personal assembly and tinkering experience.
C. Motivation for Continuing New Design
The lab provides a natural introduction to product generations and the continual need to consider design. For example, the CD devices now include a single disk player, a five disk player, a portable player, and a CD-ROM system. The photocopier lab includes an old moving-top tray device, a subsequent fixed paper device with moving light and lens, a departmental copier with enlarge/reduce, multitray feed, and sort features, and a campus photoreproduction shop tour of a high speed copier with a touch sensitive, menu driven screen. Each device is thus seen as the current realization of a more general product or process concept, and the continuing need for (re)design is made evident.
D. Student-Faculty Interaction
The traditional role of a teacher standing in front of the class and presenting facts and formulas is abandoned in this laboratory. The only formal instruction is provided in three one-hour seminars surveying the history of engineering, engineering today, and the manufacturing and quality challenges of the future. Avoiding textbooks, students also read and discuss assertive excerpts from Made in America: Regaining the Productive Edge, The Deming Management Method, and The Existential Pleasures of Engineering (3, 25, 26). These readings will be expanded in future offerings.
Except during these seminars and class discussions, the students are given a copy of the laboratory chapter and sent off to work on the various activities. The instructor is always present in the lab, lending support, offering advice, answering questions, "hanging out" with the students, and watching. As a result, the students sense the instructor's genuine enthusiasm and concern for their success. The casual atmosphere encourages the participants to pose more general questions such as: "What do the various engineering disciplines involve?" "If I like this device or process, what area of engineering should I study?" "What kind of jobs would I get with this kind of a degree?" There is little question that teaching a hands-on course involves more student contact time than a lecture-based course, but the students benefit strongly from this direct, interactive approach.
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