Distributed Laboratory for System Dynamics and Control

For engineering students in introductory system dynamics and controls courses that need to gain intuitive feel for physical systems, our distributed laboratory is a way to explore basic concepts through a hands-on experience that uses inexpensive, custom hardware and software kits. Unlike traditional laboratory experiences, our distributed lab kit is brought home by each student and tackled on a self-paced schedule in much the same manner as a homework assignment, thus allowing each student to customize the laboratory experience to his or her learning style. In our pilot project, lab kits whose parts cost are less than $100 when purchased in lot sizes of 100 will be designed and tested. Our kits contains a controller board based on a standard microcontroller chip that implements real-time control and data acquisition software and communicates with a host over a serial port. The systems under study will be hardware modules that connect to the controller board. The host computer will be the student's home PC running a Visual Basic application for experiment control. Twenty-five kits with a motor-driven inertia hardware module, an electrical network plus speaker module and a cantilever beam module will be constructed and given to undergraduate mechanical engineering students in the beginning system dynamics course as part of their regular curriculum. Our evaluation plan will assess project progress, views of the students and other stakeholders about the distributed lab, and the impact of the lab on student learning.