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Session xxxx

HOT WHEELS®, BLACKBOARD AND LABVIEW – WHAT DO THEY HAVE IN COMMON?

Murat Tanyel Geneva College

Abstract

After nine years of keeping away from freshmen, I taught an “Introduction to Engineering” course this year. Although I had undertaken the project with great trepidation, the course turned out to be one that I enjoyed teaching. In the lab, I introduced LabVIEW, a graphical programming language for data acquisition, analysis and presentation. The course was supplemented by the Blackboard Learning System on the web and Hot Wheels® incentives in the classroom. This paper reports on the introduction to LabVIEW in the lab, the enhancement that the Blackboard Learning System brought to the course and the effect of Hot Wheels® incentives on the class dynamics as well as the student design projects. It summarizes the programming topics I covered with LabVIEW and provides some examples of exercises in the lab. It also describes the activity that took place in the Blackboard site for the course, and concludes with a summary of the students’ impressions of these new programming and learning environments.

I. Introduction

It started with a phone call: A department member was taking a sabbatical, one of the courses he was teaching could be covered by another professor if I could relieve this professor by teaching EGR 101: Introduction to Engineering. Anyone in academia would be familiar with this kind of a last minute course shuffle and I was not as surprised as I was horrified when I found out that my time had come. I, - teaching freshmen? I had done it in one of my previous lives, but had deliberately taught primarily upperclassmen for the last nine years. By the end of the summer, it was clear: I was teaching 101 whether I liked it or not. This paper will give an account of the new ideas I tried and the students’ response to these enhancements.

One enhancement was the utilization of Blackboard, an online teaching platform which is an effective tool for web-based delivery of course material1. Although this platform is best suited for distance-education courses, traditional courses like EGR 101 also benefit from the use of this program.

The other change I initiated was the introduction of the students to LabVIEW, a graphical programming environment. LabVIEW is used in upper level courses that I teach: ELE 402 (Communication Systems), ELE 305 (Electromagnetics), EGR 316 (Control Systems). There is currently an ongoing project to convert introductory physics labs, which all engineers take, into a

Proceedings of the 2005 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition Copyright  2005, American Society for Engineering Education

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Tanyel, M. (2005, June), Hot Wheels®, Blackboard And Labview – What Do They Have In Common? Paper presented at 2005 Annual Conference, Portland, Oregon. 10.18260/1-2--14245