Chief Investigator:

Prof. YEUNG Yau Yuen

Co-Investigator(s):

THO SIEW WEI 涂修威 # Dr CHAN, Chi Keung 陳志強 Dr CHEANG, Chi Chiu 蔣志超

Project Year:

5/1/2018 - 4/1/2019

Description:

In many disciplines of science and engineering education, online (or called remote-controlled) experiments are recently emerging as another important exemplar of technology-enhanced learning because it can support not only e-learning for engaging students with authentic experiments but also break through the spatial and temporal constraints of conducting experiments. Over the last two decades, there exist a number of famous remote-controlled experiments for engineering and science (mostly in physics) education but they are generally not only expensive but also difficult for widespread applications in education because of the proprietary hardware and software used for their development. Besides, many of those experiments were just converted directly from the existing traditional experiments by adding the remote control functions or features and so they generally lack effective pedagogies to make the best use of the online mode of learning. In the last two years, we have formulated an innovative low-cost and open-source approach for developing online experiments. Through the Internet, students can readily set and control the Arduino-based platform for conducting the experiments in their smart phones, tablets or computers at anytime and anywhere by using a web browser without installing any bulky and/or proprietary plugins. We shall integrate a kind of pedagogy called Prediction-Observation-Explanation into a number of online science experiments (as already been successfully developed at the EdUHK) for converting them into some self-contained courseware for students’ self-regulated learning.