Smyser, B. M., & McCue, K. (2012, June), From Demonstration to Open-ended Labs: Revitalizing a Measurements and Analysis Course  Paper presented at 2012 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, San Antonio, Texas. 10.18260/1-2--21412

\bibitem{asee_peer_21412}
  Smyser, B. M., \& McCue, K. (2012, June), \emph{From Demonstration to Open-ended Labs: Revitalizing a Measurements and Analysis Course}
  Paper presented at 2012 ASEE Annual Conference \& Exposition, San Antonio, Texas.
  10.18260/1-2--21412

Bridget M. Smyser and Kevin McCue.  "From Demonstration to Open-ended Labs: Revitalizing a Measurements and Analysis Course".  2012 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, San Antonio, Texas, 2012, June.  ASEE Conferences, 2012.  https://peer.asee.org/21412 Internet.  18 Apr, 2025

\bibitem{asee_peer_21412}
  Bridget M. Smyser and Kevin McCue.
  "From Demonstration to Open-ended Labs: Revitalizing a Measurements and Analysis Course".
  \emph{2012 ASEE Annual Conference \& Exposition, San Antonio, Texas, 2012, June}.
  ASEE Conferences, 2012.
  https://peer.asee.org/21412 Internet.  18 Apr, 2025

@INPROCEEDINGS{asee_peer_21412
author = "Bridget M. Smyser and Kevin McCue"
title = "From Demonstration to Open-ended Labs: Revitalizing a Measurements and Analysis Course"
booktitle = "2012 ASEE Annual Conference \& Exposition"
year = "2012"
month = "June"
address = "San Antonio, Texas"
publisher = "ASEE Conferences"
note = {https://peer.asee.org/21412}
number = {10.18260/1-2--21412}
}

TY  - CPAPER
AB  -              From Demonstration to Open Ended Labs: Revitalizing a                     Measurements and Analysis CourseThe course entitled Measurements and Analysis with Thermal Science Application is a requiredcourse for Mechanical Engineering students. This course is taken during the junior year, and isdesigned to introduce students to measurement and data analysis techniques. The course is labbased, but over the course of the last 15 years the experiments have become dated and in manycases have devolved to demonstrations by the teaching assistants, with little hands onexperimentation by the students. This stemmed from an increasing number of students combinedwith concerns about the robustness of the instrumentation. This in turn severely decreasedstudent satisfaction with the labs, and led to the student perception that the course taught themvery little. In order to revitalize this course, an extensive redesign was performed, with an eyetoward developing hands-on, open ended lab experiments that allowed students much morecontrol over the outcome of the experiments. In many cases this was achieved by seeking low-cost instrumentation, so that the students could be allowed to manipulate the sensors without fearof destroying expensive equipment. Homework assignments, which had previously been typicaltextbook problems, were designed to be pre-lab exercises, where students were required todevelop lab procedures, research sensor specifications, make choices about the sensors used anddefend their choices, and develop virtual instruments in LabView. The term project, which hadbeen a group research project on an existing measurement application, was replaced with aproject in which student groups had to choose something to measure, develop a procedure, andexecute the measurement, presenting their findings in an oral and written report. Preliminaryresults indicate increased student attendance at lectures and greater engagement with thematerial. The pre-lab homework assignments have improved student understanding of labconcepts which has resulted in a more positive lab experience.
AU  - Bridget M. Smyser
AU  - Kevin McCue
CY  - San Antonio, Texas
DA  - 2012/06/10
PB  - ASEE Conferences
TI  - From Demonstration to Open-ended Labs: Revitalizing a Measurements and Analysis Course
UR  - https://peer.asee.org/21412
DO  - 10.18260/1-2--21412
ER  -