This article describes the organization of a service-learning robotics outreach and mentorship programme in an engineering department of a developing country. The programme is designed to tackle the problem of lack of integrative courses in engineering programmes and the lack of interest in science technology engineering and mathematics subjects among primary and secondary school students. Under the programme, a robotic team is formed consisting of undergraduate engineering students as mentors/coaches and primary and secondary school students as team members. The team members are taught how to design, build, and program robots to solve challenges by their mentors. The programme is intended to foster creative problem-solving abilities of students in science technology engineering and mathematics subjects at all levels of education in the context of a resource-constrained teaching and learning environment. The impacts of the programme are also reported.

This report is focused on development and implementation of a set of Virtual Instruments (VIs) for all lab projects of introductory courses in electric circuits for EE and non-EE majors. Due to using the Interchangeable Virtual Instruments (IVI) standard, these programs can be used with different lab equipment with very little software change. The distinctive features of our lab projects include: (1) Combination of front-panel operation of instruments, which helps the student develop intuition, with the use of Virtual Instruments, which saves in-lab time; (2) A shift of the paradigm of learning in the lab from obtaining a few data points to comparison of several data plots and relating them to theory; (3) Requirement that each student prints out experimental plots before leaving the lab, which helps to authenticate the data and organize the lab reports. In this report, the Virtual Instruments are described along with a discussion of their educational value, and the statistics is provided of student evaluation of the VIs as learning tools in the lab.

Madison. He is a teaching assistant at the Department of Biomedical Engineering and a lead consultant for the freshman design course, Introduction to Engineering. He also works as a chemistry instructor and curriculum coordinator for the Engineering Summer Program in the College of Engineering and is pursuing a Delta certificate in teaching and learning.