Enhancing Student Learning via Hardware in Homework

An important problem that has come up over the years in some engineering programs is the loss of laboratory experiences in favor of more theoretical emphasis in upper division courses. Advanced courses such as Electronics II, communications, and others have lost their labs due to the curriculum changes and the tendency becoming more towards the theoretical from the practical. Many faculty over the years have regretted the loss of the "hands on" experience of lab work. In electrical engineering (EE) curriculums, the majority of programs include laboratory work only in introductory courses such as circuits and logic design. Theory courses most often lack the hands-on experience that is given traditional lab courses and do not resonate with the students without the lab component. We have integrated laboratory experiences into purely theoretical courses via Hardware-in-Homework (HiH) concept without requiring any change on course credits. In HiH, students are given lab work that they would complete using their portable lab kit or using their own lab using the lab-in-a-box approach. This allows courses that either never had a lab experience or lost the lab experience to result in a value added lab experience. Our lab-in-a-box approach uses Analog Discovery Kit with its unique measurement features. Analog Discovery is a low cost and portable test and measurement device, which provides various instruments that can be easily controlled or observed on any computer via USB port. This is a real, hands-on lab where students build basic circuits, exercise them with waveforms and switch closures, collect analog and digital data, control outputs, and analyze the results This work shares the results of HiH integration in our junior level Electronics II theory course. In order to assess improvement in learning via lab enhancement, three means of assessment has been used: pre- and post- surveys and the comparison of learning outcomes between online laboratory and simulation groups. Results indicate that HiH integration contributes to the improvement of multiple learning outcomes and can improve student confidence.