(82e) Enhanced Learning Via Open-Form Laboratory Projects for Process Control

With the increased availability of affordable sensors, data-acquisition devices, transducers, actuators, electronic parts and sophisticated software support, we were able to incorporate an open-form laboratory experience for the students.  During the spring semester of 2012, we initiated this experimental approach in the laboratory portion of the undergraduate process control class at Michigan Technological University.   Although special projects have always been available as a separate course to the students, the difference in this endeavor was to require all the students in the class, in groups of two, to build their own experiments from the proposal stage, to the specification and purchase of the parts, to the execution of their chosen experiment, and then to final reporting.  We took the first three weeks to introduce the most basic elements of control and computing to the students.  The rest of the semester was then opened to the students to develop and perform their experiments.  Each group was allowed to choose their own experiment and they were given a starting budget of $100.  However, if they could articulate and persuade us of the need for extra funds, then we would approve an increase in their budget. This allowed all students, including those who would not have chosen to take on such a project, to discover and apply the concepts of process control that were simultaneously covered in the lecture portion of the course.  We observed a very significant increase in personal engagement and learning among the students for the process control as a result of this activity.

In this paper, we will explain the mechanics of our experiment in laboratory education and discuss the important observations we found.  We will also include a list of improvements and best practices. Since this was initiated only in the spring semester of 2012, the data will mostly be anecdotal.   Nonetheless, I have been teaching this course for several years now, and the difference we saw was very notable.  This includes students, who were initially uninterested in the course, devoted several extra hours outside of their allotted laboratory time, plus weekends, to go beyond their initial proposed experiment in order to improve the control performance of their chosen system.  In addition, the students were actually conferring and helping each other figure things out since we had not given them any specific procedure or instruction. We did not notice any competition among the groups.