Enhancing Engineering Students' Troubleshooting Skills
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Paper ID #34938
Enhancing Engineering Students’ Troubleshooting Skills
Dr. Bill M. Diong, Kennesaw State University
Dr. Bill Diong received the B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from the University
of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He gained valuable practical experience as a Senior Research Engineer
with Sundstrand Aerospace (now merged into Collins Aerospace, a unit of Raytheon Technologies Cor-
poration) before returning to academia. He is currently a Professor of Electrical Engineering at Kennesaw
State University, in Marietta, GA, and also serves as the institution’s Associate Vice-President for Re-
search. His research and teaching interests include engineering education, power electronic systems,
advanced power and energy systems, and dynamic systems and control.
Dr. Craig A. Chin, Kennesaw State University
Craig A. Chin is currently an Associate Professor in the electrical engineering department at Kennesaw
State University. His research interests include applying digital signal processing and machine learn-
ing techniques to biomedical signals/images, and investigating innovations in engineering education to
enhance student learning.
Dr. Sandip Das, Kennesaw State University
Sandip Das is currently an Associate Professor in the Electrical Engineering Department at Kennesaw
State University. Dr. Das received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of South Car-
olina, Columbia in 2014. His research interests include solar photovoltaics and renewable energy systems,
alternative energy harvesting devices, semiconductor optoelectronic devices, applied electronics, and de-
velopment of technology enhanced teaching tools and pedagogical framework for improved engineering
education.
Dr. Ayse Tekes, Kennesaw State University
Ayse Tekes is an Assistant Professor in the Mechanical Engineering Department at Kennesaw State Uni-
versity. She received her B.S., M.S. and Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from Istanbul Technical Univer-
sity, Turkey. She worked as a research engineer at Rotorcraft Research Center in Turkey, where she was
responsible for modeling of helicopter and developing stability analysis. After her PhD, she worked as
a postdoctoral researcher in Micromachined Sensors and Transducers (MiST) research group at Georgia
Tech. She focused on modeling the dynamic behavior of Capacitive Micromachined Ultrasonic Trans-
ducers (CMUTs) and reduction of the nonlinearities in large signal operation. Before current position,
she has been working as an instructor in Mechanical Engineering Department at Kennesaw State Uni-
versity. She teaches Engineering Dynamics, System Dynamics and Control, Machine Dynamics and
Vibrations, Vibrations Lab, Matlab and Product Realization courses. Her research interests include math-
ematical modeling, analysis, and control of compliant mechanisms, nonlinear control, feedback control,
and MEMs modeling.
Dr. Walter Thain, Kennesaw State University
Walter E. Thain is an Associate Professor in the Electrical Engineering department and teaches courses
in circuit analysis, electronics and RF systems. He received his BS, MS, and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical
Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology. Research interests include RF communication sys-
tems, low-noise analog circuit design, energy harvesting, and digital signal processing. He spent 12 years
in industry, where he designed mixed analog-digital systems, including, short-pulse radars and antennas,
low-noise analog circuits, RF circuits, pulse generators, frequency synthesizers, switching power supplies,
and high-speed digital circuits. He is co-inventor on a patent for the design of electronic instrumentation
used to steer oil wells while drilling.
c American Society for Engineering Education, 2021
Work-in-Progress: Enhancing Engineering Students’
Troubleshooting Skills
Abstract
Several Engineering faculty at Kennesaw State University have observed over the past
few semesters that students are often unable to fulfill the original design requirements set for
their senior project due in part to their limited ability to effectively troubleshoot the technical
issues they encounter in completing their design project. Troubleshooting skill is an important
and integral part of good engineering practice. This skill represents the ability to identify and fix
a problem within an engineered system by strategizing the approach within a time-constrained
setting. To address this weakness, our group of five Engineering faculty members formed a
learning community to devise an initiative to better prepare students for troubleshooting tasks. It
is expected that this should help them not only achieve greater success in their senior design
project, but also better prepare them for the workforce. While several recent studies help
illuminate what types of short-term (within 1 course) interventions may be successful in
improving students’ troubleshooting skills, our faculty group converged unanimously on the
hypothesis that longer-term interventions may yield deeper and more lasting impact by
reinforcing a consistent framework (e.g. the approach of determining the key questions to ask
and actions to take that yield key information about the faulty system) for approaching
troubleshooting tasks as well as to diversify the students’ experiences in applying
troubleshooting skills thus helping them to become more adept. Moreover, we decided to take
the approach of developing new exercises for students to investigate fault scenarios as a fairly
easy way for instructors to support this initiative in their various lab sections. Finally, the
outcomes of these interventions can be measured at the end of each of the selected courses with
labs, but more importantly should then be evident in students being more competent
troubleshooters in their senior design project. Hence the proposed interventions to develop
students’ troubleshooting skills will initially include new mini-lectures and lab exercises for the
required courses regularly taught by this faculty group. Since some of these courses are also
required by other majors, the proposed interventions will impact 2/3 of the Engineering college’s
students, although to different extents, with the EE students being the most impacted. The work-
in-progress versions of these mini-lectures and lab exercises are briefly described in this paper.
But due to the ongoing pandemic, the full implementation of the planned interventions was put
on hold indefinitely.
Introduction/Background
Several definitions and descriptions of the term “troubleshooting” have been presented in
literature. An example of this is in [1], which defined troubleshooting as a common form of
problem solving that requires an individual to diagnose faulty systems and take direct, corrective
action to eliminate any faults in order to return the systems to their normal states. Another is in
[2], which described troubleshooting as a task that deals with problem-solving skills that are
specific to a domain such as computer programming, engineering, biology, medicine, or
psychology. Furthermore, the author described the task of troubleshooting as locating the
problem or malfunction in a system that is not working properly and then repairing or replacing
the faulty part or component. Schaafstal et. al [3] explained that troubleshooting is predominately
a cognitive task that includes the search for likely causes of faults through a potentially
enormous problem space of possible causes. In addition to fault detection or fault diagnosis,troubleshooting usually involves the repair or replacement of the faulty device. Additionally, [4]
pointed out that troubleshooting is a “process requiring system knowledge, conceptual
knowledge of how a system is supposed to function, an understanding of effective problem-
solving procedures, and an ability to manipulate effectively the problem space to minimize
extraneous information.” Based on these definitions and descriptions, an alternative working
definition for troubleshooting would be a type of problem solving that analyzes a faulty system
to identify the fault(s) in the system and then pursue the appropriate procedures to correct the
fault(s) in a timely manner.
Engineering is one of the domains where well-developed troubleshooting skills can frequently
make a substantial impact, e.g., when an engineer finds and fixes a problem that has shut down a
mass transit line. Significantly, it has been observed that the engineers entering industry have
poorly developed troubleshooting skills because they gain little hands-on experience and they
underuse test equipment in the typical U.S. undergraduate engineering curriculum [5]. More
recently (in 2018), the same observation was repeated by a member of the Kennesaw State
University (KSU) EE department’s Industry Advisory Board - during an on-campus meeting -
whose company has been hiring KSU engineering students and graduates as interns and full-time
employees, respectively. Thus, we deemed it necessary to enhance the troubleshooting skills of
our engineering students by providing them with instruction and hands-on experience resolving
problems in malfunctioning systems. Such skill can be more readily developed in laboratory
environments as compared to the traditional lecture-based classroom environment.
In addition to the above motivations, several KSU EE faculty have recently observed that many
senior design project teams could not fulfill their planned objectives partly because students
under-estimated the likelihood of hardware and/or software malfunctions and the time and effort
required to fix them. All these factors provided the impetus that led the authors to form a faculty
learning community (FLC) focused on improving the development of engineering students’
troubleshooting skills.
At KSU, FLCs are sponsored by the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (CETL),
which bring together small groups of faculty to investigate a particular teaching and learning
issue in an active, collaborative manner over the course of an academic year. The FLC allows a
platform for the faculty team to explore and implement teaching innovations and potentially lead
to documentable improvements in student learning. Our five-member FLC was formed to
investigate this critical teaching and learning issue of developing Engineering students’
troubleshooting skills and explore the scope and techniques for improving outcomes through
innovative teaching methods and/or by developing new ancillary learning resources. To achieve
the ultimate goal of improving troubleshooting skills, it is important to first assess the current
ability of students at troubleshooting and then formulate a plan to invoke improvement measures
in a few courses as a pilot study before a general strategy can be developed to apply to the entire
undergraduate curriculum. Our FLC team in this project formulated and focused on the following
relevant research questions (RQs):
RQ1. What did previous works on developing engineering students’ troubleshooting skills
propose doing that was effective? But also, what did they not (adequately) address?RQ2. How can the previously proposed effective approach(es) be used or modified to devise an
intervention plan aimed at improving KSU engineering students’ troubleshooting skills?
RQ3. (Longer-term) How effective has the adopted intervention plan been at improving KSU
engineering students’ troubleshooting skills, in particular, when assessing those students
who just completed the Senior Project course?
As a first step for the FLC study, an extensive literature search centered on, but not restricted to,
the American Society of Engineering Education’s (ASEE’s) Papers on Engineering Education
Repository (PEER) database was carried out to find papers closely related to the current study
which can provide guidance for this research. One benefit of using this database is that the PEER
papers are most convenient to download from a single site. Six key papers were identified and
thoroughly reviewed to provide a foundation for the study. The following paragraphs summarize
the findings of this sample of the literature.
Estrada and Atwood [6] explained that the factors leading to the most frustration among students
taking laboratory-based courses are difficulties with equipment and troubleshooting, difficulties
with concepts from the theory, and confusing lab documents. Woods [7] listed several key skills
for troubleshooting problems: knowledge about a range of process equipment, knowledge about
the properties, safety and unique characteristics of the specific process conditions where the
trouble occurs, system thinking, and people skills. He also pointed out that knowledge about the
domain, common faults and typical error causes, and their occurrence frequency help to build
strong troubleshooting skills.
Delvicario et al. [8] integrated troubleshooting exercises into fundamental DC electric circuits
labs for first-year engineering students to improve their critical thinking and troubleshooting
skills, help them perform better in other labs and projects, and better understand the theory
introduced in the lectures. Over three sessions, students investigated several scenarios in which
the given circuits were not working to identify and fix one or more deliberately introduced faults,
with the circuit’s complexity increasing as the semester progressed. After each session,
instructors used the students’ troubleshooting plans, based on the given list of possible faults, and
their lab reports that documented actions, discussions and conclusions, to evaluate students’
critical thinking skills using a custom-designed rubric. The instructors’ evaluations indicated that
38% of students showed significant (> 10% of rubric score) improvement in troubleshooting
skills over the three sessions, and students’ surveys reported 86% of students agreed that the
troubleshooting exercises helped them improve their troubleshooting skills.
Lin et al. [9] discussed how conceptual-mapping-based active learning can help STEM students
to improve their diagnostic skill, which is required to accurately identify the problem in a
complex technical system within a certain time frame. Conceptual mapping includes both
content knowledge and process knowledge in determining the strategy to identify and resolve the
technical problem in complex systems [10]. Essentially, these maps ‘encode’ the key questions
to ask and actions to take as ‘nodes’ that yield key information about the system, and also the
flow of thought as links between these nodes to arrive at the proper diagnosis, not unlike the
process of elimination. Lin et al. assessed conceptual mapping-based active learning in an NSF-
funded project at five institutions that had developed two computer-based training modules
focused on two fault diagnosis problems from industry and involved about 100 students from
engineering technology programs. The modules compared the two concept maps developed byexperts for diagnosing the faults, to those developed by the students in terms of both semantic similarity of the nodes and structural similarity of the map, which were used as the key indicators for assessing students’ mastery of the diagnosis principle and procedure. Interestingly, this study’s results showed that the computer-generated similarity assessment and feedback did not help the students much (on average) to improve their second-attempt maps. Troubleshooting has become an effective tool for non-engineers also to learn technical knowledge and narrow the gap between industry needs and workforce competencies [11]. Students should understand the importance of troubleshooting skills as this can help them to succeed in a course as well as at their workplace in the future. Jansson and Kelley [12] introduced a weekly rotation of lab notebook recording duties to ensure that all students would be active participants in the use of all laboratory equipment. This resulted in the students’ skills and confidence in 13 out of 14 lab competencies tested being enhanced over the course of the semester; these skills include troubleshooting, the use of lab instruments and taking critical measurements. Therefore, to summarize our survey, while there is vast literature about troubleshooting within the context of engineering education, from the sample of key works described above, it is notable that our search did not identify any systemic efforts that emphasize the development of students’ troubleshooting skills throughout ALL levels of an engineering curriculum. That is, the previously proposed interventions were carried out in a specific course but not sustained beyond that one semester, to provide reinforcement and further improvement of engineering students’ troubleshooting skills. However, our experience as students and teachers, and the evidence supporting the effectiveness of distributed practice for long-lasting learning [13], indicate that embedding troubleshooting as a thematic stem throughout an engineering curriculum could work better to help students learn troubleshooting methods, thereby increasing their performance on the culminating senior design project. In the following section, we outline the proposed new approach and modifications for the targeted courses. After that, we present a preliminary assessment of the impact of the interventions (new instructional materials and/or lab exercises) on enhancing students’ troubleshooting skills, as measured by surveys as well as the speed at which errors were identified and corrected in the end-of-semester “challenge” exercises. These help us to corroborate the improvements in students’ troubleshooting skills with our interventions. In the concluding section, we discuss the implications of our results. Proposed new approach & modifications Based on the findings from our literature review, we propose the introduction of new mini- lectures and lab exercises that are related to troubleshooting, similar to what was implemented and reported by [8], but our aim is to do this at all levels of the Engineering curriculum. Moreover, for the proposed mini-lectures and lab exercises, we plan to loosely use the technique of concept mapping. By this we mean that generating the key questions to ask and actions to take (the concept map nodes) for determining key information about the system will be very much emphasized to the students while the actual sequence of these questions and actions will be less emphasized. This recognizes, for example, that eliminating possible causes of a problem in a
different order typically still results in the same correct diagnosis. Note though that while we
propose that the type of intervention be consistent from course to course, the details of the
intervention’s elements will depend on each course’s distinct content and characteristics (e.g.,
how the lab exercises are conducted). Our pilot effort focuses mostly on the EE curriculum,
which has six required courses (not counting Senior Project) that have laboratory sections where
the students can learn more (compared to past students) about troubleshooting, and then practice
and sharpen their troubleshooting skills. One benefit of this tighter focus is that the key questions
and actions should almost always pertain to the devices, the circuit (how devices are connected
together) and the circuit’s inputs (both power and signal(s)). Moreover, since some of these
courses are required in other Engineering majors as well, the scope of impact of these
troubleshooting-related interventions will actually extend beyond the EE major, resulting in the
improvement of the troubleshooting skills of other Engineering majors as well.
Hence, we chose to intervene in several required courses with labs for EE, ME, Computer
Engineering (CpE) and Mechatronics Engineering (MTRE) majors to achieve a broad and
repeated reinforcing impact, which are: EE 2301 – Circuit Analysis I (EE, CpE, MTRE majors),
EE 2305 - Electronic Circuits & Machines (ME majors), EE 2501 - Digital Logic Design (EE,
CpE, MTRE majors), EE 3401 – Engineering Electronics (EE, CpE, MTRE majors), EE 3501 -
Embedded Systems (EE majors), EE 3601 – Electric Machines (EE majors) and ME 4501 –
Vibrations & Controls Lab (ME majors). However, the initial targeted courses for this research
are EE 2301, EE 3401, EE 3601 and ME 4501. In Figure 1, we show a rough timeline for
developing and implementing the interventions, and then assessing their effect on students’
troubleshooting performance in the senior design project course (initially just the EE one).
Assessment methods are being developed for the initial four courses in the pilot program as well
as the senior project course. The intent is to measure the effectiveness of the implemented
troubleshooting instructional methodologies over a two-year period, refining them as needed.
The program will expand to more courses as necessary. It is expected that by fall semester 2022,
the instructional methodologies and assessment techniques will be mature. From that point
forward, a feedback mechanism will be used to make minor adjustments on a yearly basis.
Moreover, in the next sub-section, the proposed pedagogical modifications to the above-
mentioned four courses ensuing from this FLC’s initial efforts are presented.
Pilot Program Standardize
Assessment Troubleshooting
Revise and
(Quantitative and Methodologies Revise Lab
Pilot Program Expand Pilot
Qualitative ) and Interventions Exercises
EE 2301 Program
Across Multiple
EE 3401 Courses
EE 3601 Develop Senior
ME 4501 Evaluate Senior
Project
Evaluate Senior Evaluate Senior Project Teams
Troubleshooting
Assessment Project Teams Project Teams
Fall 2020 – Spring 2021
Fall 2021 Spring 2022 – Summer 2022 Fall 2022,
and beyond
Figure 1. Timeline for the various stages of the proposed troubleshooting skills enhancement
initiative.Interventions
In this research study, we will investigate whether the proposed instructional materials and/or
assignments help engineering students develop their troubleshooting skills. The total number of
students expected to participate in this study is 200. The planned interventions for enhancing
students’ troubleshooting skills are new mini-lectures and lab exercises focusing on developing
such skills. These new mini-lectures and lab exercises cover identifying and correcting common
errors made by engineering students, e.g., those that EE students make while connecting
components together to form circuits. Then lab exercise challenges, serving as troubleshooting
competitions, will be held at the end-of-the-semester, with the time taken for the deliberately
introduced errors to be identified and corrected by students recorded as the key performance
data. In addition, pre- and post-intervention surveys will be administered to the students, who
consent to participate in the lab exercise challenges, for their feedback on the new mini-lectures
and newly designed lab exercises, to determine where impactful improvements can be made for
their next iteration.
Data from the pre- and post-intervention surveys will be collected and analyzed using statistical
methods to determine the impact of the new instruction materials and/or lab exercises in
developing students’ troubleshooting skills throughout all levels of an engineering curriculum.
Our initial efforts carrying out this study are described for the following courses.
1. EE 2301 – Circuit Analysis I:
A troubleshooting laboratory exercise was designed to assess students’ ability to diagnose open-
circuit and short-circuit faults of a series-parallel circuit using standard circuit analysis laboratory
equipment. Students were divided into groups of two or three and were presented with three
series-parallel circuits. The fault-free state of each circuit was the same, and this state was
obtained via a simulation exercise prior to the troubleshooting exercise. However, each circuit
for the laboratory exercise contained a unique fault that caused it to produce measurements
inconsistent with the fault-free state. The exercise was timed and the mean and standard
deviation of the time it took each group to successfully troubleshoot each circuit are given in
Table 1.
Table 1. Troubleshooting Times.
Standard Deviation of
Circuit Configuration Mean Completion Time (s)
Completion Times (s)
1 212 197
2 282 247
3 183 157
The most notable result from Table 1 is the large standard deviations for each circuit
configuration. This indicates that some students were very adept at identifying the circuit faults
while other students were not. These results represent a control sample, but a treatment sample,
where a troubleshooting intervention is performed prior to completing the troubleshootingexercise, was not obtained due to the early end to the Spring 2020 semester as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Future interventions could be developed based on Johnson’s model for troubleshooting [14]. This model consists of three steps: problem representation, fault isolation, and solution verification. The problem representation phase includes the initial evaluation of a system. A suitable intervention for this phase would be to teach students how to develop concept maps of the system under investigation [10]. An accurate concept map of the system should enhance a student’s ability to isolate the fault(s). One possible intervention for the fault isolation stage would be to introduce students to effective methods for fault isolation: exhaustive, topographic, split-half and functional/discrepancy detection [15]. 2. EE 3401 – Engineering Electronics: The EE 3401 Engineering Electronics course introduces students to the characteristics and applications of operational amplifiers, diodes, bipolar junction transistors, and MOS transistors. Difficulties that students have in the lab component of this course are attributed primarily to (1) lack of fundamental knowledge of device and circuit behavior, (2) the inability to use the oscilloscope correctly, (3) difficulty correlating circuit schematic diagrams with physical solderless breadboard component layouts and (4) misunderstanding the solderless breadboard’s internal connections. These difficulties negatively impact students’ troubleshooting performance when confronted with a malfunctioning electronic circuit during the lab exercises. To begin addressing these problems, laboratory instructional materials were modified and introduced to students in the Fall 2019 semester. One of the most significant modifications was including more SPICE circuit simulations as part of the prelab assignments students completed before performing the lab exercises. The intent was to augment numerical calculations with the waveform simulations that produced circuit output waveforms much like students would see with their breadboarded circuits. Another major modification was production of short videos that addressed lab test equipment operation with emphasis on the oscilloscope. The lab instructions themselves were edited to improve circuit schematic diagrams, clarify procedures, and include more comprehensive background theory. To help determine the efficacy of the improved instructional material on students’ troubleshooting abilities, two instructors offered an optional, extra-credit “troubleshooting challenge” at the end of the Fall 2019 semester to their lab sections. The instructors taught both the classroom and laboratory components of the course. The challenge was divided into two parts. The first tested students’ proficiency at using an oscilloscope. The second utilized an operational amplifier circuit with students performing theoretical calculations, constructing the challenge circuit, and measuring circuit waveforms. The two parts were each timed. Twenty-four students participated in the challenge. Results were evaluated, and course extra credit awarded according to the correct responses students had, which was their main objective in taking the challenge. The instructors assessed the results to establish a troubleshooting performance baseline and develop an improvement plan for lab instruction methodologies and revisions to the troubleshooting challenge. The Spring 2020 version was modified to include a survey assessing students’ opinions of the instructional
material and their troubleshooting capabilities. The modifications were also designed to bring the troubleshooting challenge into compliance with KSU’s guidelines on human subject research so that results could be disseminated. Unfortunately, the COVID-19 epidemic and resulting shift to online instruction forced the implementation of an online troubleshooting challenge. Students did not have access to test equipment and so the Spring semester’s challenge was completely different than the Fall semester’s challenge and therefore their results are not directly comparable. The Spring semester online troubleshooting challenge was administered through an online quiz in the Desire to Learn (D2L) learning management system. The challenge consisted of 12 questions worth a total of 18 points). Students could earn up to 3 extra credits points toward their final course grade by taking this optional quiz. Thirty out of 36 engaged students (about 83%) in the class participated in the troubleshooting challenge quiz. It is notable that this online participation in Spring 2020 for the troubleshooting challenge was much higher than the physical in-lab troubleshooting challenge held in Fall 2019. The online troubleshooting quiz questions comprised of snapshots of circuits built on a breadboard, LTspice simulation results, oscilloscope screenshots, and circuit schematics. Students were challenged with various troubleshooting tasks, such as (1) identify the type of different amplifier circuits by investigating the circuit diagram or by analyzing input/output waveforms, (2) identify wrong circuit connections, (3) identify the possible issues in a circuit by analyzing the output signal waveforms, (4) identify an unknown signal through analysis and calculations on a given circuit etc. The questions were designed to assess a wide variety of critical and fundamental troubleshooting skills that are required for excellence in an introductory analog electronics lab. A couple of the troubleshooting question examples are shown in Figure 2. Figure 2. (a) Breadboarded full-wave bridge rectifier with wiring error, (b1) amplifier simulation circuit with incorrect negative power supply voltage, and (b2) resulting input (blue) and output (red) waveforms.
Figure 2(a) shows a full bridge rectifier breadboard circuit with a wrong connection. This type of connection mistake is very common in an introductory electronics or circuits course. Students were asked to diagnose the circuit visually and find if there were any connection issues. Similarly, as shown in Figure 2(b1), the amplifier circuit schematic created in the LTspice circuit simulator was presented to the students along with the resulting output waveform of the amplifier as presented in Figure 2(b2). Students were asked to analyze the given circuit to identify the possible reason(s) why the output waveform was distorted (the lower half was cut-off). Since the modality, the student population, and the challenge questions were different in the Fall 2019 and Spring 2020 semesters due to the ongoing pandemic, a direct comparison of the assessment results cannot be made. However, assessment results for both modes reflect some common areas of improvement and provides a qualitative understanding of the student skill levels in this course. Based on our preliminary assessment results, we plan to develop a rigorous troubleshooting skill improvement instructional pedagogy to implement in the future semesters. With online instruction continuing in the Summer 2020 semester, EE 3401 lab exercises were rewritten to give students experiences that approximate hands-on labs. Even though students do not have access to lab equipment and are not required to breadboard circuits, the LTspice simulations were retained, and additional elements added. In particular, some lab exercises had video measurement demonstrations, with students asked to assess the results. There were also some online quiz questions that asked students to evaluate breadboard circuit layout photographs and look for wiring errors or other problems. After the return to on-campus instruction, it is expected that some of the developed online lab exercise content will be retained. 3. EE 3601 – Electric Machines: In the EE 3601 lab exercises, a common type of mistake that students make and then need to troubleshoot is the wiring connection error, even when the wiring diagram has been provided to them. Hence, as one illustrative example, the challenge that was proposed for these students is the circuit used for short-circuit testing of a Synchronous Generator, where a wiring error is deliberately introduced. The students were challenged individually, with the desired wiring diagram provided to them, and also the expected values for the armature current as the field current is stepped-up from 0 A. This challenge was done during the last week of the Fall 2019 semester, and the time each student took to correctly identify and fix the wiring error was recorded as the performance metric for this challenge, with 30 minutes specified as the time limit for solving the challenge. This data was to serve as the baseline (from a control group) for comparing to the results of an identical challenge performed by the next semester’s students who would undergo an intervention. Plans for the Spring 2020 semester were going to focus on selecting an appropriate approach for the new troubleshooting mini-lectures and/or lab exercises, and then developing these materials for that semester’s EE3601 students to enhance their ability to troubleshoot wiring connection errors. However, the pandemic derailed those plans. 4. ME 4501 – Vibrations & Controls Lab: Engineering students should be equipped with problem solving skills as an undergraduate so that they will be able to identify the problems, classify and prioritize the possible sources of errors and draw conclusions after experiments [16]–[18]. As commercially available educational turn-
key systems utilized in undergraduate-level mechanical engineering laboratories are commonly
equipped with their already developed software, students don’t understand the signal process
from the system input to its output and the data collection [19], [20]. They simply need to follow
the instructions from their laboratory handouts and use the software to record and export data
without necessarily making connections between the sensors and data acquisition card.
For this project, we are aiming to design new laboratory assignments for ME 4501 to enhance
students’ troubleshooting skills and also develop cost-effective and portable laboratory
equipment, thereby giving students the opportunity to assemble the system/mechanism, create
connections between sensors and data acquisition cards, and interpret the recorded data and
analyze the sources of possible failures.
Conclusions
Being proficient at troubleshooting is an important skill for engineering students to develop, so
they can identify and fix problems by a strategized, systematic approach within the time-
constrained setting in which most engineering work takes place. KSU faculty have observed that
in many senior design projects, the students underestimate the likelihood of errors in system
design and prototyping, and the time and effort required to rectify such errors. In addition,
employers of engineering students and graduates greatly value those who are more proficient at
troubleshooting. Because of these motivations, the authors formed an FLC and the interventions
proposed in this study are being developed (as a work-in-progress) by this group to hone
students’ troubleshooting skill at multiple points throughout the curriculum.
The proposed interventions consist of new mini-lectures and lab exercises based loosely on
concept mapping, and the time students take on challenge exercises represent their
troubleshooting performance ability. Moreover, the targeted courses for this study were selected
to achieve long-term reinforcing and broad impacts. Therefore, the proposed interventions will
affect 2/3 of the Engineering college’s students (with about 5,000 students enrolled during
Spring 2020) because these targeted EE courses are also required courses for CpE, MTRE and
ME majors (although to different extents). In the long-term, when fully developed and then
implemented, this initiative should impact all of KSU’s EE, CpE, MTRE and ME students
(ideally to roughly the same extents). Completing the pilot project described in this paper will lay
the groundwork for justifying a grant proposal to expand this initiative to other Engineering
courses, and subsequently serve as a model for other universities. Moreover, it supports KSU’s
Mission Statement, which encompasses the aims to “contribute to economic development,” and
to “respond to public demand for higher education” [21].
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