Diffusion of Mobile Hands-on Learning in Puerto Rico Using the Analog Discovery Board

Universidad Del Turabo, Gurabo PR

Investigators

Abstract

The goal of this sequence of workshops is to create a community of faculty engaged in the delivery of active, hands-on courses in all the universities in Puerto Rico that offer Electrical Engineering. Faculty participants will be trained on active learning pedagogies through the use of the Mobile Hands-On Studio in the classroom. The participants in the workshop have committed to transforming their courses with mobile hands-on learning activities. The workshops will be offered by two experienced developers of the Mobile Studio who have successfully offered similar workshops in the past. The first workshop in the Fall of 2014 will introduce hands-on classroom activities using an Analog Discovery board. By the end of the first workshop the participants should have the capacity to start transforming their Spring 2015 courses with a few mobile hands-on learning activities. The second workshop, to be offered in Spring of 2015, will provide a forum to share and discuss initial impressions after having experimented with a transformed classroom. More advanced pedagogical activities will also be presented. To increase the ease of initial implementation, Analog Discovery boards and parts kits will be distributed to each participating institution to provide a seed from which to start growing the course transformation. The boards will be loaned to students at the beginning and returned by the end of each semester. The workshop organizers have retained a well-known engineering education researcher who will assess the success of the workshop itself in terms of the formation of a community of scholars and the diffusion of active learning pedagogies. These workshops have the potential to have an impact on society at many different levels. First, the project includes a research component that has the potential to contribute to our knowledge of how engineering education innovations diffuse. Second, the project is a state-wide level partnership between all the engineering institutions in Puerto Rico. It will directly improve the training and development of Hispanic faculty members in STEM and indirectly improve Hispanic student learning.