The innovation for education is in the portable and interactive hardware that can be placed into the hands of every student, from the classroom to the dorm-room. This will enable personal and crucial connections linking theory to application in science and engineering. The portable laboratory design provides an integrated solution of experimental hardware and supporting software kits involving lessons designed around leading forefronts of technology at a cost no more than a typical university lab fee. Each kit is designed to offer multiple educational experiences increasing in complexity through the progression of learning. Internet technology continues to revolutionize the world by bringing experiences to remote locations. Education is an obvious beneficiary as distribution of written and illustrated knowledge can be readily transmitted to desktop and mobile displays. However a critical part of learning involves physical interaction which provides inspiration and solidifies understanding. From primary school through universities, experiments and laboratory exercises typically involve equipment that is too bulky and costly to facilitate portability of education. The portable laboratory innovation satisfies an identified need to develop a cost-effective, content-rich, integrative, interactive, and portable family of educational tools that demonstrate real world contexts, expose advanced and new technologies, and develop hands-on skills required for future innovation.
The broader/commercial impact of this innovation should be an increase of graduates in Science, Technology, and Math (STEM). There is no shortage of concern for the state of STEM education in the U.S. today. Studies repeatedly identify need for a significant increase in the number of successful graduates. A large obstacle facing students discovering interest in STEM is enduring the daunting task of learning the foundation of theoretical concepts to solve closed-ended problems. Effective experimental interaction can provide invaluable motivation. Furthermore, it can provide a framework for learning the theoretical concepts and even introducing the challenge of solving open-ended real world problems. Currently, this experiential exposure often requires hardware systems that are not accessible for portable education. Currently, teachers, professors and self-guided students are faced with an educational tool market with offerings most often beyond budgets that can provide a personal experience. There is enormous opportunity to meet educational demand by providing hardware kits that demonstrate state-of-the-art technology while connecting students to the STEM behind the design. The portable laboratory innovation meets this demand and in doing so, provides a revolutionary approach to increasing success of STEM education.
Project Overview The Portable Educational Lab (PortaLAB™) brings excitement to Science, Technology, and Math (STEM) education by putting complete control of genuine physical cutting-edge technologies in the hands of students. In areas of study that can be complex and rigorous, this family of laboratory education kits places sophisticated hardware and tailored control software in the hands of each student, and guides them with detailed lesson plans to connect theory with real world technical challenges. For a cost targeted to be no higher than a university lab fee, the PortaLAB™ can be delivered anywhere that a student can carry a laptop computer. Product Description The first kit is developed around the control of an electromagnet that will suspend an iron sphere using magnetic levitation. Each student learns directly with their own kit the principles of automated control by taking a measurement of the position of the ball and using mathematical expressions for the ball’s speed and direction reversal to solve the problem of controlling the ball to stand still in mid-air or to bounce up and down in a specified pattern. The experiment uses a collection of hardware components common in the technical settings that an engineer would face in the world post-graduation. In this instance these components are a variable power supply, a copper coil electromagnet, an LED light source, an optical sensor, and a digital data acquisition board. A regular student-owned or lab computer is connected to analyze the signal and, using the student’s solution, generates power control signals for the electromagnet. The printed circuit boards (PCBs) for power delivery and power control are detachable for simplicity of understanding and also to offer multiple lessons on the workings of each separate technology. Project Progress Miniaturization, cost reduction, and lesson personalization were among the problems successfully solved to create the PortaLAB™ platform. The NSF-SBIR funded Phase I of this project for six months from July 2013 to January 2014. During this period, the levitation kits were re-designed with improved components to address issues that arose during testing. A prototype system was produced in a quantity sufficient to outfit a lab at the University of Texas - Austin. Valuable data was collected from the facilitators and students. In the course evaluations, students consistently cited enthusiasm over controlling magnetic levitation, a technology that will almost certainly be part of the energy efficient and environmentally friendly future of long-distance transportation of goods and people. Also during Phase I, three new PortaLAB™ devices were designed on paper. Future Products PortaLAB™-2 uses robotics as its main application. A mechanical limb that has two joints (e.g. and elbow and shoulder, or a knee and hip) can be moved by a single motor. In a typical experiment, measurements of the limb's location are used to control the motor to either move the limb to a set position or to keep it steady while holding a load against gravity. PortaLAB™-3 uses "smart machine" technology, which is a novel modification of electromagnetic generators and motors that use embedded sensing elements to continuously provide finer control of how electricity is transformed into motion or motion in to electricity. One application of smart machines is maximizing power and efficiency of a generator connected to renewable but erratic sources of motion such as wind, tides and waves. Understanding the mechanism of how to control a versatile motor/ generator machine is the key to cost-effective utilization of renewable resources. Students can learn many basic principles of physics, mathematics and engineering by solving some of the problems inherent in operating such a smart machine. PortaLAB™-4 is a small-scale analog model of a smart electrical grid. Different parts of an electric distribution network can consume, generate, or store and release power at different rates that change over time. A student using a PortaLAB™-4 would learn how to use feedback from sensors located at strategic locations in the grid to deduce what is happening all over the system. The student’s solution would then be used to change the connectivity of the power lines between certain places to make sure that no components get brown-outs or overloads. Although all 4 PEL devices were designed to teach control theory to engineering undergraduates, the same apparatus can bring the excitement of future technologies to the teaching of many other topics in science, mathematics and technology. Each device is ingeniously configured to allow a lesson to isolate any small part of the system and allow students to experiment with it while they learn how it works. In this way, students in high school and home school can use the PEL to get a greater appreciation for excitement and practicality of STEM fields.
