Instrumentation Laboratory: Challenges of Teaching a Large Class

Regardless of the job description and duties, for every engineer, it is essential to understand how data is acquired and analyzed. Therefore, the implementation of an instrumentation laboratory in an undergraduate Mechanical Engineering curriculum is necessary. A laboratory specialized in instrumentation provides students with hands-on experiences – a component missing from many traditional courses, which focus mainly on theory. This course allows students to comprehend and apply the various methods and types of diagnostics that are used to collect data in numerous mechanical systems. The main challenge in an instrumentation laboratory at large engineering institutions is the class size. Most often, the amount of hands-on experience that each student receives decreases as the class size increases. Courses, such as this, are facing issues that arise from large increases in student enrollment. The main concern is how to continue to effectively educate students so that they learn essential skills with limited equipment and funds. Several teaching methods and techniques have been implemented in an undergraduate instrumentations laboratory course to address these issues. Some of these improvements include creating multiple small classroom environments, modifying the laboratory experiments to allow all students to gain hands-on experience, and encouraging students to work together. Students have responded positively to these changes and stated that these new techniques have improved their understanding of the material. Improved lab report grades corroborate student feedback. This paper will discuss these techniques and improvements that were implemented to successfully teach different instrumentation techniques to undergraduate Mechanical Engineering students in a large (100 students) class environment while retaining the hands-on approach.