MULTIPURPOSE MOBILE HP LABORATORY FOR SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING STUDENTS

Students’ retention remains one of the main challenges in Science and Engineering education. Technology-enhanced learning has a potential to shift the classroom environment from professor-centered to student-centered which translates into the improved learning outcomes and increased students’ satisfaction. At Ryerson, we frequently experiment with various technologies to support active learning in our classes. The electronic pen technology utilized in the tablet personal computers, as well as screen capture technology open up new exciting opportunities in teaching Science, Mathematics, Engineering and Technology (SMET) disciplines. Thanks to the generous HP Educational Technology Initiative grant, we have been able to create the HP Multipurpose Mobile Science Laboratory for our students in Sciences and Engineering Programs. Since Fall 2008, the tablet PCs have been used in our second year Modern Physics and third year Electricity and Magnetism courses. Each pair of students was provided with tablet PC for in-class use. The tablets allowed us to introduce collaborative studio-style environment blending together lecture and tutorial, where the students can annotate instructor’s lectures, collaborate on problem solving, run applets and simulations, and submit their work, all in real time. Using Classroom Presented Software (free academic software created at the University of Washington, Seattle, US) the students were able to join the instructor’s presentation in real time. The students were able to follow the instructor’s presentation on their screens and add their own notes. At the end of the class, the students had their own versions of annotated lecture saved on memory sticks or had the presentations send to their own e-mail accounts. In-class use of tablets significantly increases student-instructor communication. Encouraged by the positive feedback from our students, we have recently expanded the use of tablets to offer selected laboratory assignments. In addition to the activities described above, the mobile lab is also presently used in the Optical Spectroscopy lab in our Photonics Course for second-year Medical Physics students as well as for Video-Based Motion Analysis lab in a large Mechanics course for the first year students in Engineering Programs. In addition, we use Camtasia Studio software that allows capturing computer screen activity as a video clip. We use tablet PCs to create mini-lessons on selected topics that are known to be particularly challenging for the undergraduate students. We will also discuss the effect of tablet PCs on students' learning and course satisfaction. We believe that the tablet inking capabilities and screen capturing capabilities have largely unexplored potential to engage the students in active learning in science and engineering courses.

This work is being supported by HP Innovations in Education Initiative.