Lab Assistant

Brief Project Description
Dynamics and Control Laboratories, like many laboratory classes, require intensive staff support to ensure that students achieve the maximum benefit from the learning opportunities available. The purpose of this application is to reduce the time staff have to spend on simple but essential 'student-comfort' feedback, allowing staff contact time to be used more effectively to deal with students higher level conceptual difficulties, yet still maintaining an overall high standard of student support and feedback. At the same time, the inclusion of a simulation tool will enhance the learning opportunity by allowing the students to explore and develop their understanding.

This project produced a generic laboratory assistant, which provides a simple tool for the students to use while working in the laboratory, giving them simple feedback as they progress through the laboratory procedures. The feedback and questions can be edited by the tutor, allowing the generic shell to be used in as many situations as possible. The students input answers, which are stored for assessment by the tutor, and can print out their results. The generic tool provides feedback, checks answers, assists with marking and provides a simple graph sketching and checking tool.

A basic model of this tool was developed as a final year project and was used as the starting point and as a demonstration of the feasibility of the project.

Benefits of Project

• An increase in the level of simple feedback to students, allowing them to confirm their progress and understanding of the material.
• The building of student confidence in lab work, as they are given feedback as they progress through the material.
• Increase staff time available to deal with more complex levels of misunderstanding of material, concepts and procedures within the cognitive domain. The simulation tool extends the learning opportunities further.
• Improved levels of support with no increase in staffing levels in the lab.
• Production of laboratory assessments in a standard format that will assist in the time spent in marking, and that will also improve the consistency and transparency of the assessment criteria.

The tool was developed using Visual Basic for Excel. The tool runs with a form based interface which provides password protected access for tutors to Excel and enables them to write the questions. The tool runs on standalone Win95 machines which have Office 97 installed.

SCREEN SHOTS
Sample of screen shots from software

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