Web Apps to Enhance Lab Activities

Overview

This resource provides educators with a suite of web-based approaches that can be used to improve the efficiency and efficacy of lab activities. 

The key is understanding what the problem is in order to apply any of these tools effectively. The first step is to therefore ask yourself: "where are the pinch points in my lab?" Having identified this, this toolkit provides four digital approaches to alleviating such issues:

1. Real-time formative assessment & feedback systems, allow students to test their knowledge and get feedback as they work through an activity.
   Example: An Osborne-Reynolds experiment (source code)

2. Interactive data analysis tools to allow students to observe trends in their measurement data in real time, and reduce repetitive or unnecessary processing for students, where it's of no value to the learning outcomes.
   Example: The Flow Energy Conservation Lab (source code)

3. Digital (web-based) lab instructions incorporating "progressive disclosure" techniques guide students step-by-step through an activity.
   Example: The Measurement Lab (source code)

4. A lab that runs itself, using a combination of the above (and more) so that a lab activity can take place safely and effectively with minimal intervention from staff or teaching assistants throughout!
   Example: The Hydrostatic Carousel (source code)

All of these techniques were primarily developed by the author to address challenges faced in a Fluids Engineering Laboratory. The above examples all therefore all have a fluids engineering context, but highlight how the techniques have been applied in practice, with very successful outcomes. 

Key benefits

To save time for staff and students, and making it possible to accommodate larger cohorts of students where lab space is constrained.

Through these approaches activity times can be reduced so that labs can be used more effectively and staff and student time is used more efficiently. In addition, staff can reduce the need to answer the same questions and fixing trivial issues over and over again.

Ultimately, these techniques enable the delivery of labs to more students and less staff (academic, technical, teaching assistants), whilst at the same time maintaining (if not improving) the effectiveness of the teaching environment.

Re-use or Adapt

You can use this resource as-is for your own teaching or you can adapt it to suit your own needs, as long as the full terms of the licence are followed. 

Guidelines on How to Build an Interactive Teaching Tool with AI here.