Teaching to Improve Student Learning at Engineering Introductory Physics Courses

Abstract- This project aims to enhance student-learning acting in two fronts. The first one is the intensive use of laboratory experiments as a complement to regular classes. The second step is how to assist these experiments integrating them with computer data acquisition. The innovation is that students are able to perform a computer simulation before the experiment. With software developed to integrate simulation and experiment, the student could predict the behavior of a physical situation, perform the experiment and compare both results to make a synthesis of them. At this stage of the project, we developed two experiments. The first one is a pendulum, which permit students observe the behavior of dumped oscillations. The second experiment consists in an air track with a data acquisition system and an impact transducer, based on a LVDT (Linear Variable Differential Transducer), which performs evaluations in motion, energy and collisions, in order to verify the conservation of linear momentum. Both, data acquisition hardware and interactive software, were developed in Computer Engineering Laboratories at UnicenP, with continuous interaction of the students, creating experiments and interfaces that points directly to students most frequent questions. Beside that, we could reach another objective: how Physics, Computer Science and Electronics interact themselves to generate knowledge. This point achieves the search for a multidisciplinary effort on Engineering teaching