The goals of this undergraduate laboratory improvement project are: (1) to present a unified approach to the principles and practices of date acquisition and control, and (2) to establish an "interactive experimentation" environment. A new approach is taken for effective presentation of data acquisition and control principles and practices in the laboratory. The equipment requested is workstation-based, allowing significant enhancement of the laboratory experiment sessions. This multi-user environment provides direct student participation in the data acquisition and control process. Integration of the data acquisition systems into the campus computer network provides additional access by the student for pre- and post-laboratory activity. The objectives of the project are also to create the "interactive experimentation" environment; one that allows the students to acquire the data, to control the experiment, to reduce, analyze, and present the data, and finally, to upload the results for later integration into an engineering report. This approach represents a significant improvement over a data taking session which often leaves the student frustrated and without full comprehension of the material.
