Keeping students engaged in a Virtual Setting: Hands-on Mechatronics course with Arduino Engineering Kit
Are you looking for ways to keep your students engaged in a virtual setting? Would you like to spice up your courses with hands-on projects? Using Arduino Engineering Kit, you can achieve these. Due to COVID-19, many instructors started to look for creative ways of giving students a lab experience. Some of them chose to create virtual labs, some of them designed hardware projects with low-cost hardware or integrated hardware projects kits to their curriculum. If you are interested in how Dr. Azadi from San Francisco State University used Arduino Engineering Kit during the pandemic to teach his Mechatronics course, check out these articles:
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The main post above is about the Mechatronics Class/Lectures I taught at San Francisco State University prior to 2020 where I used Rev 1 of the Arduino Engineering Kit. Here are some updates from the recent class taught in Fall 2021 where we used Rev2. I hope this feedback would be useful for those who plan to use this kit. I also hope Arduino and Mathworks consider some of the suggestions below for Rev3. Based on the many learning outcomes achieved by using these kits, I think the kit is an affordable kit and is a useful teaching package. I encourage these companies to keep up their good work and improve the kit and Matlab/Simulink Support packages for Arduino.
- The Arduino Engineering Kit Rev 2 has a better Arduino accompanying site and it is about 50$ cheaper (With Tax my students paid 250$). Our school covered half of the cost in the Fall semester.
- About 20% (4- 5 students) of the students had issues with some of the components including the Microcontroller boards. The customer service was responsive and sent them new components. In one case they sent a whole new kit. Communication and response times of the customer service are ok but can be a little faster.*
With Rev 2 a student can make three Robots.
- The content and components related to the first Robot (the drawing robot) were improved and students could complete the projects and learn many things.
- The quality of the components especially the webcam and the instruction for the second Robot (Rover) is poor. I suggest skipping this Robot unless you have lots of time. I hope to see many improvements in the next revision related to the Rover. None of my students could complete the Rover and faced many issues.
- The third Robot (The Bicycle) was interesting but needs an update on the code. The Simulink program and instructions should be slightly improved. My students were able to maintain the balance by setting an offset.
Here are some of the videos where the students provide more feedback and some hints on how to complete their projects: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLxewORsDcNQCJnJg0w7lElgDZ9SYR0N8Q
Thank you, Dr. Azadi, for sharing your updated observations, as well as videos from your students!
