Adapting through a Pandemic: Creating a Hands-On Mechatronics Laboratory with Team-Based Collaboration for Remote Learning

ABSTRACT

This paper introduces a hands-on laboratory curriculum for an undergraduate mechatronics course that delivers a team-based collaborative student experience for remote learning. COVID-19 pandemic created unexpected challenges for educators, where in-person teachings had to quickly transition to remote learning. This significantly impacted learning outcomes for hands-on laboratory courses by students not having access to laboratory equipment and the difficulty to follow the education practice “learn by doing” in the confines of their home. A remote laboratory curriculum is introduced with a series of hands-on mechatronic labs. Three individual student labs introduce how to operate a microcontroller, process infrared sensor signals, and program digital communication displays. Then two team-based collaborative labs explore how students can transmit/receive signals to control a servo using an ESP32 microcontroller with wireless communication over a bi-directional shared server. Then a course project on remote teleoperation is introduced for student-to-student collaboration at home. The learning experience gave students insight into a growing technological area, where teleoperation is in such fields as in-home healthcare, space and ocean exploration, and human-machine collaboration. Student survey results provided positive feedback on their ability to meet project requirements with the challenges of being at home instead of having an in-person learning environment. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2022.