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Session Description

Ticketed event: $60.00
Lecturing has been shown to be an inefficient technique to get students to learn concepts in engineering. Demonstrating the concepts to students where they can see the principles used in the experimental design and analysis–or better yet, involving students in the experiment itself where they must apply the concepts to achieve the design goal–stimulates a deeper understanding of the material. With the availability of portable electronic instrumentation, low power electronic microcontroller boards, and open source/freeware simulation programs, hands-on learning can now be integrated into engineering curriculum. Participants will evaluate several active learning modules that have been designed to demonstrate theoretical concepts and to stimulate student engagement in the learning process. The design of hands-on activities, the value of supporting instructional materials, and methods to incorporate these activities into the curriculum will be discussed. Participants will leave the workshop with electronic instrumentation, provided by Digilent, Inc, as well as with example instructional materials so that participants can easily adopt this innovative technique in their own courses.

Speaker

1. Dr. Kathleen Meehan

   California State University, Chico

   Kathleen Meehan earned her BS in Electrical Engineering from Manhattan College and her MS and PhD from the University of Illinois under the supervision of Prof. Nick Holonyak, Jr. She worked as a member of technical staff at Lytel, Inc., following graduation. At Polaroid, she was appointed a Senior Research Group Leader, responsible for the design of laser diodes and arrays. After leaving Polaroid, she was employed at Biocontrol Technology. She moved into academia full-time in 1997 and worked at the University of Denver and West Virginia University before joining Virginia Tech in 2002. She is involved in curriculum development and educational research as well as research on nanoscale materials and packaging. Since 2003, she has collaborated with Dr. Robert W. Hendricks to develop an instructional platform known as Lab-in-a-Box, with assistance of a number of undergraduate students that is used in a number of courses within the Virginia Tech BSEE program.