SmartLab Magnetic: A Modern Paradigm for Student Laboratories

Abstract

Undergraduate laboratories should provide means to help the student visualize often complex concepts, to achieve a more lasting understanding and, thus, a more significant learning of the ideas presented in the lectures. However, the laboratories often require students to struggle with complex instrumentation operation and tedious data collection and processing that affect negatively their motivation and distract off the learning objectives. This paper introduces through a specific implementation a recent paradigm for student laboratories, designated as SmartLabs, as an effort to help overcome these drawbacks. SmartLabs Magnetic is a combination of existing magnetic circuits test equipment plus a versatile sensors set combined with a standard and affordable data acquisition card and a portable device App. SmartLab Magnetic collects data during magnetic circuits laboratory tests, processes this data to provide results more easily related to the basic concepts being tested and manages the data into reports that can be sent to the student e-mail account within the App. Students' opinions of the relevance, usefulness, and motivational effect of the new SmartLab Magnetic were very positive.

Keywords

• Undergraduate laboratories
• Data acquisition and processing
• Magnetic circuits
• Magnetic saturation
• Magnetic losses
• Reluctance.