Build-your-own, hands-on workshops: Teaching acoustics, engineering, and programming with something to take home

Students studying acoustics often come from various backgrounds, from engineering to music. While courses in acoustics can help teach fundamental concepts to students regardless of their background, learning tangible, applicable skills can be difficult, especially for those without prior exposure to specific skills and tools. At Penn State, a series of student-run hands-on, build-your-own workshops were implemented to help all students learn translatable skills such as computer-aided design (CAD), rapid prototyping, electronics, microcontrollers, and programming. For example, a set of workshops focused on building a mini dodecahedron speaker. Students learned to use a collaborative, online-based tool for CAD, and the basics of 3-D printing. Students also learned to solder and to calculate resistance in series and parallel. Each student can take home the finished product, so that students can not only learn the skills associated with the workshops but also have something physical to take home. The workshops can be designed to be low-cost and could also extend to teaching other related skills such as acoustic measurements and speaker characterization. These hands-on workshops implement active learning methods and universal design for learning and have potential applications to not just undergraduate or graduate students, but to students at all levels and backgrounds.