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Data Acquisition Toolbox 2.15
Northeastern University's MATLAB Based Discovery Lab Teaches Freshmen to Think Like Engineers
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A new discovery lab teaches computer programming and engineering concepts to freshmen by providing hands-on experience with test and measurement instrumentation. Created by Professors Stephen McKnight and Gilead Tadmor of Northeastern University and Professor E. Carr Everback of Swarthmore College, the lab uses MATLAB and the Data Acquisition and Instrument Control Toolboxes.
"The discovery lab makes an excellent introduction to programming concepts that are often troublesome for the beginner," comments McKnight, "and by using MATLAB as the programming environment, we are enhancing the student's ability to succeed."
Challenge
Freshmen enter engineering courses with diverse abilities and interests. While some have designed their own Web pages and completed courses in C or C++, others barely understand directory structures and file manipulation.
It is difficult to create classroom projects that meet all students' needs. Instructors often select easy-to-learn but uninspiring problems, such as number sorting, or examples, such as fluid friction, that depend on advanced theories of mathematics and physics. In either case, the course is generally unsatisfactory.
McKnight, Tadmor, and Everbach sought a teaching tool that would motivate and challenge students whatever their background and experience.
"We chose MATLAB as the programming environment for interfacing computers with test and measurement instrumentation because it lets professors introduce programming and engineering concepts in simple, easily observable, sequential steps."Professor Stephen McKnight
Northeastern University
Solution
They found their solution while working on the education component of a National Science Foundation grant for an engineering research center for subsurface sensing and imaging systems. They created an engineering lab that uses computers interfaced with test and measurement instrumentation to benchmark and characterize commercial subsystems, such as global positioning system sensors, ground penetration radar, digital cameras.
McKnight, Tadmor, and Everbach realized that the lab would be an invaluable teaching tool—a "high-tech tools and toys laboratory" (HTT&TL) that would expose students to real engineering challenges. This lab became the foundation for a new format for a freshman course at Northeastern: Engineering Problem-Solving Using Software Applications.
The Northeastern lab is equipped with GPIB-capable test and measurement equipment, acoustic and ultrasonic transducers, and stepper-motor-controlled actuators. The instrumentation includes an Agilent programmable multimeter, a power supply, a signal generator and a digital oscilloscope linked over a bus to a GPIB controller card, and a standard Pentium II PC with a National Instruments 6024E multifunction I/O board.
MATLAB was chosen as the programming environment, says McKnight, because "MATLAB is superior to C for most analysis tasks." MATLAB toolboxes implement the measurement and control functions. The Data Acquisition Toolbox controls and communicates with industry standard A/D-D/A boards, and the Instrument Control Toolbox allows arbitrary instrument control text strings to be sent out on the GPIB bus through the controller card. "The overriding advantage of these new toolboxes," notes McKnight, "is that they allow instrument control and data acquisition functions to be carried out in the same environment and with the same syntax as the powerful MATLAB signal processing, computation, graphics, and visualization tools."
The course curriculum is based on modules that build on each other throughout the semester. The modules are designed to be completed in one or two sessions. In the lab, students measure the speed of sound in air and water, control a stepper motor and an x-y positioner, and image a subsurface object by ultrasound reflection. They also write programs that instruct the computer to cause a physical movement of a motor—providing immediate, rewarding feedback.
Northeastern ran the new course during the winter quarter of 2001. Student response was enthusiastic. A second HTT&TL course, using optical imaging systems, is under development at Boston University.
Results
- A single, efficient software environment. Students use a single software tool to control their instruments and analyze their data. This avoids the multistep process of saving acquired data to a file and then reading the file into MATLAB.
- Real engineering experience. "Students experience real-world laboratory effects, such as noise, sampling artifacts, and thresholding techniques," says McKnight. "They practice reconciling real data with theory and inferring simple mathematical models from measurement data. And they are asked to think like engineers by making realistic trade-offs between experimental accuracy and measurement time."
- High student motivation. Feedback has been 100% positive. Students said that they "like using MATLAB along with stepper motors and transducers to show how our experiments are related to real-world problems and to our majors."
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