An Electronic Instrumentation Course for Non-Electronic Engineering Students

Abstract

This paper reports on the implementation of a required course on electronic instrumentation for informatics engineering students. These students had proved in previous years to require a special approach, as their motivation for this subject was low. The course focuses on the basic concepts of Electronic Instrumentation, including analogue-to-digital and digital-to-analogue conversion and introducing the concept of instrument control. The course was organised in a set of lectures coupled with laboratory experiments, and a small project. To foster collaborative learning all the students work on the same laboratory experiments, simultaneously, organised in groups of two. The students' feedback on the course was more positive than in previous years, although not substantially so in terms of results. We feel that a change of attitude took place effectively, and that this could be attributed to the laboratory experiments using LabVIEW.