Utilizing HP-Mobile Technology
for Electrical Engineering Education Enhancement
in a CLASS-LAB Environment
Assiut University
Egypt
Introduction
Technology can be seen as a critical complement to the educational experience, opening more opportunities for the students.
As we know, today’s employees need to acquire and enhance core capabilities, such as working in teams, communication and problem solving. All these skills are promoted by advanced teaching technologies.
Through the use of HP-Mobile Technology the project intends to enhance the quality of the graduates of the electrical engineering department to meet the needs of the work environment.
Dept:
Electrical Engineering
Courses Impacted: *Designing with Microcontrollers - Engineering
*Digital Communications - Engineering
*Electronic Circuits - Engineering
*Microprocessors - Engineering
Students Impacted:
240 students
Faculty Involved:
3 + 1 Assistant
●Assiut lies 375Km south of Cairo.
●Assiut University was inaugurated in 1957.
●The number of enrolled students in the Faculty of Engineering are 5650, 25% of them are Females.
There was always a strong need to addresses a very important problem in most of the universities in Egypt namely the quality of teaching and learning. In fact the need for developing a strong education system is imperative due to the fact that the world’s labor supply is globalized.
Classical lectures including monotonous one directional electronic presentations (Power Point and the like) do not engage students sufficiently.
Also the separation between theoretical material and applied design oriented activities represent a fundamental problem in electrical engineering education.
All of these problems can find a solution when efficiently using mobile technology. Students will be more involved in the learning process, and their ability to work and learn collaboratively will be enhanced. Mixing theory with the design is made easy through the interactive environment and possible brain storming created by the mobile technology.
● Classroom and lab boundaries are removed, so that in the same hour lab experiments will be conducted as a direct application to the lecture material .
● Extended open class-lab hours, which means that the course hours are not limited to the official time.
● Each student has a tablet PC and an ATMEL programming board. When working by his own the student will be challenged to understand and perform the lab experiments.
● Interaction and discussions are done through the use of the Classroom Presenter (of Washington University).
· In the first semester of its application to be able to judge the outcome of using this mobile Technology each Student gets a tablet PC (no sharing). As the course introduced is an elective course we thus limited admission to match the number of available PC’s.
· By integrating lectures and labs, we hope to overcome the known problem in engineering
education of the disconnect between theoretical lecture material and practical
In our department we moved from blackboard to electronic presentation (Power Point and the like). It allowed the preparation of well organized material in advance, and gives a means of showing information rich content such as tables, formulas, programs, and diagrams with ease and in a neat way. Yet the opportunity of using mobile technology and tablet PC’s by both the lecturer and students seems to find a solution for the handicap of the above mentioned electronic presentation, by allowing:
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Adjusting pace of lecture in response to student reactions.
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Developing spontaneous examples and explanations.
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Allowing annotation with natural handwriting and real time derivations.
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Supporting what can be named “collective brainstorming”, where answers that students speak out are written down.
laboratory applications, we also hope that the lecture material will be better understood and that lab time will be of real benefit than traditionally the case.
· Naturally the demand to participate in this course was high but for the sake of testing the effectiveness of this kind of teaching technology, the admitted students represented a vertical segment of the student population with all levels represented.
· One expected learning outcome is that students will be more motivated and engaged by the material
· Conceptual understanding of the course material will be quantified via exams and hands on design and implementation. Student perception of the use of Tablet PCs will be also measured.
· We shall also investigate the case of a tablet PC, instead of a laptop, being used only by the Lecturer in classes with large student numbers.
Assiut University, Electrical Engineering Department
Assiut, Egypt
PI:
Hany Selim, Prof. Dr.,
hselim@aun.edu.eg, Tel +2088 2411131
Co-PI:
Tarek I. Haweel, Prof. Dr.,
tarekiah@hotmail.com, Tel +
20882412191|
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This project supported in part by an HP Technology for Teaching grant.
Atmel AVR University Program