The Challenge:

Unless laboratory classes are sufficiently explicit, students can find it difficult to visualise the concepts being taught. Laboratories should also be engaging to help develop student’s interest in the subject matter. The challenge in this work was to develop laboratories that meet these goals by evaluating their effectiveness. The Solution: Develop and implement pedagogically sound virtual instruments to aid the learning process. Compare the student’s laboratory results for a control group that took the non-instrumetned version with those who took the instrumented laboratory and examine the statistical significance of these. Over the past two years, seven Virtual Instruments (VIs) have been developed using LabView software and associated instrumentation. These have been piloted with over 200 undergraduate and postgraduat