ACTIVATING A SECOND YEAR MEASUREMENT LAB SEQUENCE

MECH 215 is a core measurement course in Mechanical and Materials Engineering at Queen’s University with a lab component intended to maintain active learning skills fostered in the common first year program. In contrast to cookbook labs it is more process focused and drives student engagement through several active learning techniques. The learning objectives of a typical undergraduate lab experience are often undermined by the conflicting objectives of completing the task as quickly as possible while producing a good mark. The MECH 215 sequence intentionally reduces the complexity of the lab content in order to focus on the process and require active engagement in the measurement activity through several simple techniques.

• Incomplete information is provided in the lab material. Students are required to discover necessary characteristics of the available equipment and make independent decisions in order to meet the objectives.
• Just in time delivery of knowledge is provided in several ways. The students work in small groups within a larger lab plaza, so discovered information travels peer to peer. TAs and a faculty member monitor progress and deliver assistance only when students have hit a roadblock. 
• Planned failure is incorporated into the activities with the expectation that some (or all) students will not get high quality data or flawless instrument performance. Overcoming these problems exercises critical thinking and engineering decision making skills in the lab environment. 
• Multiple paths to a successful outcome exist for the activities. Students have choices to make in how they use the available resources.

The paper outlines the sequence of activities with specific examples of the application of these principles in practice and illustration of the flow of measurement concepts. This approach to giving labs provides some efficiencies of scale from having many groups active on the same activities at the same time, but also requires more faculty engagement in the delivery. A cost comparison between delivery methods in the same environment is made, showing that substantial advancement of CDIO syllabus objectives can be reached for little or no incremental cost.