Abstract:

Physics, technology, and computer engineering are plural because of its broad spectrum of applications in different disciplines and fields. Today’s industry, for example, demands graduates competent in instrumentation and in computational software packages that are widely used in the private and public sectors as well as in academia. Graduates use their knowledge and skills in number-crunching, simulations and modelling, physics, games, and of more immediate interest, in electronic instrumentation for data acquisition, automation, and processing, among many other fields. However, teaching undergraduate students about (1) computer interfacing, and (2) instrument control techniques for collecting and processing data to automate tasks are subjects that seldom appear in their curriculum. On top of that, it is now accepted that software acquisition from outside vendors is a practice that only temporally catches the students’ attention and motivates them for a very short time span. Furthermore, a review undertaken by Reeves and Crippen showed that this approach does not promote the design and development in engineering students, what should be a priority to arouse their intellectual curiosity. Moreover, computational thinking has been pointed out as a key component for effective learning. With these reasons as a motivation, we firstly lectured and trained first year engineering undergraduates in using MATLAB for developing a GUI to interactively and remotely control and read a couple of temperature sensors for automating experimental data acquisition. Secondly, we presented them a sequence of laboratory practices associated to temperature dependent phenomena to better grasp concepts such as Newton´s law of cooling and quantity of heat. Thirdly, we tested their physics comprehension and compared the results against the control group observing remarkable differences. We conclude that this kind of hands-on lab activity merging physics, math, and programming might be an excellent tripod for engineering education.

Keywords:

Engineering education, MATLAB, GUI, physics, temperature, heat.