Design Of Experimental Electronics Platform For STEM Education in Low Resource Distance Learning Scenarios

Practical implementation is the most important aspect for engineering students. Like in recent era of Covid-19, due to lockdown and other restrictions implemented by the government, the students were unable to access their laboratories and perform their practicals. This leads to lack of the concepti

Project Title

Design Of Experimental Electronics Platform For STEM Education in Low Resource Distance Learning Scenarios

Project Area of Specialization

Electrical/Electronic Engineering

Project Summary

Practical implementation is the most important aspect for engineering students. Like in recent era of Covid-19, due to lockdown and other restrictions implemented by the government, the students were unable to access their laboratories and perform their practicals. This leads to lack of the conceptional knowledge and technical skills. The unclear understanding of the basic concept of circuit analysis would result them to suffer in upcoming electrical engineering courses. This motivates us to find such a way that the students can perform their lab tasks at home. In addition to this, we also have to consider the financial perspective of an undergraduate student therefore we are proposing an idea of designing a low cost and easily accessible Arduino Based  Circuit Analysis Labs. This proposed solution will encourage student to learn about the practical implementation of circuit analysis process as in past due to covid-19 situation simulation based labs were perform and simulation based labs do not notify us about the un ideal situations in circuits like line losses, impedance unbalancing and so on. This clue up the students about these conditions and prepare them to deal with it.

Project Objectives

• To Design Arduino based system to perform circuit analysis labs. This objective entails the design of: a) arduino based digital multimeter, b) arduino based oscilloscope and c) arduino based function generator.
• To design basic electricity and circuit analysis labs as prescribed by HEC curriculum in the form of a lab manual with 6 to 9 labs
• To perform an experiment to a group of students in order to compare the effectiveness of performing the conventional lab techniques and simulation based technique with Arduino based techniques.

Project Implementation Method

 As practical implementation is one of the most significant aspect in engineering of any field, here in this section we have proposed  relatively new technique for the students to perform their lab task at home in post covid situation. Basically we have divided this project into two parts:

• Technical domain
• Educational domain.

We shall take Circuit Analysis lab manual for making different labs circuits. The circuits made will be interfaced with arduino according to the required conditions. The circuit will be at least equally effective as the conventional circuit. All the lab lab task will be carried out through arduino and the results will be displayed on Arduino serial monitor or computer screens. Multiple voltage and current sensors will be used in order to measure current and voltage across different components as per the requirements of the labs. Normally an oscilloscope is an important tool in electrical field which is used to display electrical signals as it varies with time but here with this technique there will be no oscilloscope as all the graphs will displayed on arduino monitor. The programs of each lab will be uploaded on arduino so that the students can make any changes accordingly to get the desired results.

To test this new technique with the conventional method we shall be doing a social experiment on a group of students. Two groups will be made one will be the control group and second the group will be the group under test. The labs performed by the group under test will be compared by the group using conventional method. According to the simplicity, selectivity and the reliability of the proposed technique, we shall be comparing the results of our social experiment.

Benefits of the Project

The experimental performance of any course is extremely important in order to understand the theoretical work they get through formal lectures. This experimental electronics kit will enable the student to practice the practical implementation repeatedly at home or anywhere. It?s like low cost circuit analysis laboratory at everyone?s home. Day by day innovations in electronics drastically changing the experimental methods in many areas all over the world and this covid-19 situation brainstorm many people and educational organization to figure out more and more ways of home learning in a better way. Apart from this it also enable students to interact with these multipurpose microcontrollers and there programming which are also used in many other areas of technology. It enhances student?s technical skills in participation with computer programming skills. Being an electrical engineer the better understanding of code would be a key point. Replacement of expensive component in lab like function generator, and oscilloscope with arduino reduces its cost drastically and performing same operation. After COVID-19 the betterment of online education and home learning becomes one of the most significant concerns for educational professional.

After covid-19 educational institution especially technical ones are bothering about making the online education more and more effective so in order to create a distance learning lab kit for circuit analysis we are going to perform several task which are as follow.

1) Firstly we are going to design a circuit for a particular lab.

2) We will interface the circuit with arduino.

3) These labs kits will be given to the students to perform certain tasks and then we will be going to compare their results with the students performing labs with conventional method.

Technical Details of Final Deliverable

Three low-cost and open-source lab equipment with complete design files and schematics and source code for the firmware. The equipment are: digital multimeter, digital oscilloscope, digital function generator

A lab manual comprising of 6 to 9 labs for the course of basic electricity and circuit analysis that shall be designed under the guidance of HEC approved curriculum

Comparison about understanding of circuit analysis between students who use Arduino based lab kits and those who use conventional lab apparatus

Final Deliverable of the Project

HW/SW integrated system

Core Industry

Education

Other Industries

Core Technology

Others

Other Technologies

Sustainable Development Goals

Quality Education

Required Resources

If you need this project, please contact me on contact@adikhanofficial.com