3.1 Bringing practical engineering into the physical and virtual undergraduate lecture space.

Roderick Lubbock

Imperial College London

In this presentation I will discuss my experiences from the last two years of delivering engineering practice teaching to 1st year students in the Dept. of Aeronautics at Imperial College London. Initially (2019) I redesigned the course around a small scale highly realistic engineering device (1/10th scale petrol radio-controlled cars), then redesigned it again (2020) for remote delivery, this time around 1/12th scale electric radio-controlled cars. The classes were delivered to a cohort of 140-170 students exclusively using flipped and active learning with a focus on getting the students to carry out real engineering activities.

3.2 Challenges and solutions of remote lab-based teaching and assessment for electrical and electronic engineering

Daniel Fallows, Ahmed Aldabbagh, Richard Davies, Ricardo Goncalves Correia, Steve Bull and Steve Greedy

University of Nottingham

"The Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at the University of Nottingham had recently redesigned the way its courses are delivered. As part of this redesign significant project-based modules, accounting for one third of the year’s activities and assessment, were introduced into each of the 1st and 2nd year.

The modules are centred around six full weeks of design studio-based activity that allows for the rapid development of key practical skills and creativity, whilst encouraging students to think like engineers – all of which are attributes highly desired by employers.

To mitigate for the impact of the pandemic the modules were quickly re-designed to provide students with the same level of practical engagement whether they are attending in-person or remotely. Modifications to the activities ranged from the provision of kits of equipment, to setting up remote and virtual labs to enable us to deliver the same learning outcomes for both of our flagship 1st and 2nd year practical modules.

This paper will demonstrate our approach to retaining practical activities, provision of feedback and support, sharing of good engineering practice amongst the year groups and mechanisms for progress tracking to identify students in difficulty, as well as a discussion of lessons learnt"

3.3 Deployment of Robots Remotely in Teaching Programming and Robotics – Future of Engineering Laboratories

Wasim Ahmad, Chong Li and Dr Kelum Gamage

University of Glasgow

Laboratory practices are essential and play an important part in professional and engineering education. Because of the recent outbreak of COVID-19, students have had limited access to engineering labs during this academic year. With social distancing in place, accommodating students for their practical and computing work was one of the biggest challenges facing the Universities, especially the engineering departments. To provide an immersive and engaging experience to students at The University of Glasgow during lockdown situation, we deployed a humanoid robot as a testbed or apparatus that students can access and use remotely for their lab and project work, hence eliminating the requirement to attend the lab physically. More than 200 students from the University of Glasgow and the Glasgow College UESTC (GC-UESTC), China, used the developed robotic system remotely in their course lab and design projects during Fall semester 2020-2021. Students could access the developed robot-based lab setup remotely, either individually or as a group, to perform their experiments and work collaboratively on their design project. Along with 4-external cameras in place, students could observe the output or reaction of the robot through live streaming coming from these cameras and interact with it through voice commands and conversation.

3.4 Open-source remote laboratory experiments for controls engineering education.

David Reid and Timothy D. Drysdale

University of Edinburgh

In this presentation, we will reflect on our first experience of using a new remote lab approach in the ‘Controls and Instrumentation 3’ course in the School of Engineering at the University of Edinburgh. Our hardware is built using readily available electronic components and inexpensive fabrication methods. The PID controller firmware runs on an Arduino Nano 33 IoT microcontroller, with a Raspberry Pi to stream (to an AWS server) data from the microcontroller and video from the RPi camera module. Students are able to book individual remote labs from a booking page and access a web based interface to see the camera stream of the real equipment; control the hardware; and collect, graph and download data for further analysis. We retain a real-time latency (i.e. instant responsiveness), even for experiments hosted behind firewalls. In the shift from proximal to remote lab experiences, we are concerned there may be a perception amongst students that there is a reduction in their autonomy. We are therefore exploring whether reconfigurable user interfaces combined with mixed-format (mixing simulation, live and recorded video) remote labs can recover this perceived loss of autonomy. We are also working toward bringing remote laboratories into the mainstream by creating and evolving an open-source federated approach with a lower barrier to entry than existing legacy solutions.