Lessons Learned: Hands-on Fluids Lab in Remote Delivery Mode

Abstract

With the advent of the COVID-19 outbreak, major disruptions were witnessed in the engineering education community, especially with regards to course delivery. With the subsequent cancelation of in-person classes, transition to remote delivery had to be swift, and both faculty and students had to face many challenges, not the least of which was how to handle course-integrated laboratory exercises. At Grand Valley State University, while the traditional in-person classrooms were converted to virtual classrooms with relative ease, a major concern was the delivery of the accompanying laboratories for certain courses, especially fluid mechanics. The fluid mechanics lab, which requires extensive hands-on experience, is woven into the lecture component; therefore, it was concerning that the students would miss this vital component, resulting in a greatly diminished experience. Several possibilities ranging from canceling the lab to simply providing data for the students to analyze were considered. Ultimately, to preserve the conceptual and mechanical literacies, it was decided to incorporate the hands-on approach by requiring students to conduct certain experiments at-home using readily available (or easy to purchase) supplies and analyze the collected data. This paper demonstrates several innovative ideas that were implemented to enable students to better comprehend fluid mechanics concepts through engaging hands-on experiments. A total of eleven different labs and a project were conducted during the remote semester. Of the eleven labs, six required students to conduct at-home experiments in addition to the experiments conducted onsite. For ten of the eleven labs, the authors conducted experiments onsite and provided students with data for further analysis; aspects of some, but not all, onsite experiments were video recorded for the students, but the at-home experiments were demonstrated by video. The students welcomed the at-home experiments and indicated that it was vital in their understanding of certain fundamental concepts while being fun at the same time. Assessment indicated that this approach seemed to be effective in terms of outcomes with respect to fluid mechanics (cross-sectional study), but the aspects of deep learning and confidence did significantly decrease performance in the subsequent advanced course, heat transfer (long-term study).