Work in progress: Hybrid lab for engineering learning

This paper describes the implementation of a hybrid platform for experimental activities in engineering courses. The proposed platform can be used as a remote or face-to-face laboratory;it may also be ideal for the new normal after the Covid 19 pandemic. The proposal has the purpose to help engineering teachers to build this hybrid laboratory without specialized knowledge, requiring little time for its implementation and practically no economic investment. To validate the proposal, the process to build the course of a hybrid laboratory for Control System course is described in this paper, which is expected to have experimental activities within the university and from home. After the implementation, the full functionality of the laboratory will be carried out both in its remote and face-to-face format. © 2023 IEEE.

Outreach activities of the Extreme Energy Events Project

The Extreme Energy Events Project (EEE) represents a breakthrough in outreach activities in Cosmic Ray Physics: high school students are protagonists of an experiment to measure Extensive Air Showers at ground. They start their experience at CERN with the construction of the three high performing Multigap Resistive Plate Chambers constituting the telescope that is then installed inside their school;then they take care of the telescope operation and data analysis. Presently 60 telescopes are installed in Italy and, since 2014, coordinated data taking have been performed during each school year providing a huge amount of candidate muon tracks. Every year hundreds of students and teachers are involved in the activities directly correlated to EEE. The COVID-19 pandemic has strongly affected the experimental activities of the EEE Project. However in the last two years the online activities were strengthened, with an intense programme of collaboration meetings, masterclasses, and hugely successful topical seminars. Starting from the fall of 2021, the improvement of epidemiological situation made it possible to start some of the EEE activities in presence. © Copyright owned by the author(s) under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

Evaluating Student Computational Thinking Skills in Physics Experimental Class

Learning physics during the pandemic has encountered obstacles, especially in the implementation of experimental activities. Teachers have difficulty making innovation of learning because of the limitation of students' experiments facilities. This study aims to evaluate student computational thinking skills after using Problem-Based Learning models with Problem Solving Laboratory-based worksheet that utilizes simple physics experiments using smartphones. This study uses a quasi-experimental design with two experimental classes: A model class, an experimental class, and one control class. Ninety subjects are consisting of 26 male and 64 female students participated in this study. Data were collected digitally using the google form consisting of questions set of computational thinking skills and a questionnaire of student responses. Data were analyzed using descriptive and inferential statistics in the form of Analysis Covariant. The results proved that there is a difference in the ability for each class. The most increasing of student ability has happened in the experimental class. This study concludes that Learning media has more influence than learning models. These results are expected to trigger similar research to overcome practical problems during the COVID-19 pandemic. © 2022 Association for Computing Machinery. All rights reserved.