Hands-on activities can be used in engineering classrooms to bolster student participation and understanding of concepts. Often, financial burdens and the time necessary to design, modify, and create these activities can inhibit widespread use. To address these common barriers, we have designed low-cost desktop learning modules (LC-DLMs) that are less than the cost of a textbook, established a dissemination plan to propagate their use across the nation, and developed robust measures to assess the effectiveness of both the LC-DLMs and dissemination efforts. We hypothesize that updates to the physical modules and accompanying materials will improve students’ conceptual understanding and that a systematic propagation, along with faculty support, will see increased use of these hands-on modules.

During the past year, we have made progress in each of the three objectives of this NSF project. To propagate use of LC-DLMs, we have continued our hub-and-spoke dissemination plan. Workshops were scheduled for two of the seven national hubs that serve as locations for onetime training workshops for geographically close “spoke” participants, specifically the Southeast and Central Hubs. Due to weather, the workshops were consolidated. At the workshop, participants heard presentations on the motivation behind this project, DLM design, instructional philosophy, and best implementation practices, and also had a chance to use all four modules in conjunction with suggested classroom worksheets.