Whack a Filter on it:

... the art of reframing lab activities

How do you take a dull lab activity and turn it into a highly engaging one?

Wouldn't it be great if you had a list of easy and powerful ways you could transform your lab sessions?

The University of Sheffield's team in Multidisciplinary Engineering Education (MEE) have created this Open Educational Resource (OER) for just this purpose.

We have carefully examined our portfolio of 400+ lab activities to identify what makes a great lab - and created this list of 'Filters' which you can use to design/ re-design labs to ensure high student engagement, enjoyment & learning. Click here to read more about 'What is a Filter?'.

12 Lab Filters, just click on one to find out more and see some examples:

The Validation Lab

Compare the data from an experiment to theory and determine how well they agree.

The Mystery Lab

Make the objective of the lab a mystery for students to solve!

The Sensory Lab

Include interactive aspects relating to touch, sight, hearing, or smell.

The Digital Immersion Lab

Use digital enhancement such as virtual and augmented reality to extend the possibilities of an experiment.

The Competition Lab

Whatever the objective of the lab is, turn it into a competition (perhaps even with prizes!)

The CoLABorative Lab

Work together to contribute to a larger task or single laboratory output.

The Broken Lab

Deliberately introduce a broken element of the lab task that students will find and fix.

The Easy Lab

Simplify the lab by focusing on key concepts or outcomes in a low pressure setting.

The Real-World Lab

Contextualize experiments with the real world by testing theories on practical applications.

Design-Build-Test Lab

Solve open ended projects to solve a brief by designing, building, and testing solutions.

The Fabrication Lab

Fabricate something physical from scratch using raw materials and following a process.

The Reverse Engineering Lab

Deconstruct something to figure out how something works, how it was built, or the engineering behind it.

It would be great to hear from you if you have found this resource useful, by filling in this very(!) short form.

This work, 'Lab Filters OER' © 2024 is created by Charis Bronze, Harry Day, Andrew Garrard, Chalak Omar, Raja Toqeer, Tom Howard and Matteo Di Benedetti. The University of Sheffield is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. This resource is available to use under the Creative Commons Attribution Licence (CC BY-SA). Feel free to use, share or adapt this resource, but please link back to this site as attribution.