Using the Mobile Studio to Facilitate Non-Traditional Approaches to Education and Outreach

Abstract

STEM education at all levels from kindergarten through grad school generally requires expensive, complex equipment and thus is typically built around elaborate facilities with well-trained staff support. Mobile Studio Pedagogy (using the Mobile Studio Desktop software and the I/O board) makes it possible for instructors and students to participate in hands-on learning to any place they have a computer. Mobile Studio gives them access, at any time and any place, to a full electronics laboratory for the price of a textbook; students have a portable lab in which tinkering is again possible; requiring only a spark of interest -not a big budget. With a good start provided by interested and dedicated teachers, student accomplishments are only limited by their imagination. Since the Mobile Studio provides a portable lab facility, students can apply the tools they use in the classroom in their personal projects. The most obvious examples involve tinkering with cars (e.g., finding security system workarounds for someone building a car from an early 90's GM drivetrain) and robotics (e.g., adding a real electrical engineering component to a project for a robotics competition). Less obvious are the kinds of activities that show how exciting engineering can be provided by our students that make us so proud of them (e.g. finishing that great idea they had in their high school science fair on their own or a handicapped driver visiting science classes in their old high school).When students share these real world experiences, they are providing the best kind of motivation for future STEM professionals.