Building a doorbell for deaf people: Motivational electronic experiment for freshmen

Abstract

Renewed emphasis on (capstone or cornerstone) design courses and application of educational and learning researches are just two of the changes that Engineering Education has been through recently. Despite the many possible approaches in Inductive Learning, the fact is that students’ expectations of teaching, learning and technology have hardly changed over the years. This paper presents a lab experiment on assistive technology for deaf people to help build freshmen motivation and to address electronics concepts as early as possible in an engineering course. Learner satisfaction was evaluated by a 16-item questionnaire completed by 67 students from two distinct undergraduate programs. Learner satisfaction was assessed as a set of four dimensions: ‘Content’, ‘User Interface’, ‘Ease of Use’ and ‘Enthusiasm and Motivation’, all evaluated in a seven-level Likert Scale (ranging from ‘strongly disagree’ to ‘strongly agree’). Reported scores of ‘agree’ or ‘strongly agree’ Likert-scale options are 77%, 62%, 56%, and 76%, respectively, for ‘Content’, ‘User Interface’, ‘Ease of Use’ and ‘Enthusiasm and Motivation’ dimensions. We believe that similar scores on related dimensions are good tokens of the overall consistency of the results. In summary, students seem satisfied with the doorbell lab experiment, but improvements should be made on user interface and ease of use aspects in future versions of the experiment.