Abstract:

The current teaching context of the area of Electronics at the Miguel Hernandez University, involves a large number of common subjects to all branches of engineering degrees at the Higher Polytechnic School. They are generally established as compulsory subjects in the 2nd year of such technical degrees. Their practical schedule is limited to a total of 18 hours at the electronics laboratory in face to face format. This fact adds more complexity to the goal of promoting active learning and competence learning amongst students. In addition to this, the low availability of measurement equipment also poses a challenge, since the ratio of equipment per student is barely 15 to 50.

That is why this project proposes a solution to address the deficit in active and competence learning, and at the same time, to try to alleviate the needs for space and specific laboratory material, as well as the lack of time for practical sessions. For this last aspect, it will be essential to establish a methodology with a flipped classroom approach, where students can optimize their time dedicated to autonomous study prior to practical sessions. Likewise, it will be necessary to have digital tools that allow the electronics laboratory to be “virtualized” for blended use by students.

Considering the experience of the lecturers participating in this project, this work proposes the content digitalization of the practical sessions of different Electronics subjects. To that end, we rely on the tool Tinkercad in order to virtualize the laboratory, and secondly, on the tool Edpuzzle in order to edit and generate audiovisual content that will help monitoring and assessing the improvement of the students, while they acquire practical and active skills, in an inverted way.

Overall, the achievement indicators to assess the effectivity of the proposal, analyse:
i) the assimilation of concepts and procedures after watching videos and executing virtual sessions in Tinkercad, prior to the practical laboratory sessions;
ii) the evolution in the domain of practical procedures such us resolution of cases, measurements and circuit implementation;
iii) acquisition of autonomy to find solutions to practical activities, upon the resources provided;
iv) general satisfaction, measured by the self-concept of achievement reported by students.

The results have compared the improvements at content and practical skills acquisition demonstrated by students who participated in the flipped proposal with virtual tools support in contrast to those students who did not participated, and thus kept focused on the previous face-to-face methodology.

Keywords:

Electronics, flipped classroom, virtual lab.