Alternatives to Classical Curricula: Exploring Engineer Skills of Teaching-Assistance Scholarship Holders in Not-Structured Lab Lessons of Optoelectronic Instrumentation

Abstract

The contribution of teaching-assistant students to the planning and realisation of a new laboratory experiment of an automation engineering course is presented and a number of insights into the benefits of this approach for achieving excellence in undergraduate curricula are discussed in this paper. Due to its multidisciplinary characteristics, like the opportunity to integrate the knowledge acquired at different courses and to further develop communication and teamwork skills, this was thought to be a high-level laboratory activity. The experiment carried out consists of a Micrologix programmable logic controller-based system for the data acquisition of a Sharp light-emitting diode distance sensor, supported by a supervising control system, developed by the students in a free version of Elipse software.

Keywords

data acquisition engineer skills integrated learning optoelectronic sensor

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