A Low-Cost Example, Combining MIT App Inventor, Arduino Specific Components and Recycled Materials to Foster Engineering Education

Using Open Tools to Transform Retired Equipment into Powerful Engineering Education Instruments: A Smart Agri-IoT Control Example

“…The complementarity of the tasks being assigned to the students and the fluent opportunities for direct interaction with and inspection of the system under construction were further triggering the teamworking spirit. As explained in Figure 19a, participants became better in problem solving and the fact that they had to deal with a scaled-up system of realistic size, instead of a miniature but yet education-oriented implementation such as the one presented in [23] (an implementation variant that many of them were familiar with), served more effectively the valuable skills acquisition process (Figure 19b).…”

“…Indeed, according to the feedback provided by the responders, the occasional difficulties during the implementation stages were seen as valuable learning opportunities that had to be exploited to a maximum (Figure 17a), thus improving participants' potential to complete a project, according to the given specifications (Figure 17b). Furthermore, participants improved their communication and teamworking skills (Figure 18a) presented in [23] (an implementation variant that many of them were familiar with), served more effectively the valuable skills acquisition process (Figure 19b). presented in [23] (an implementation variant that many of them were familiar with), served more effectively the valuable skills acquisition process (Figure 19b).…”

“…Furthermore, participants improved their communication and teamworking skills (Figure 18a) presented in [23] (an implementation variant that many of them were familiar with), served more effectively the valuable skills acquisition process (Figure 19b). presented in [23] (an implementation variant that many of them were familiar with), served more effectively the valuable skills acquisition process (Figure 19b). presented in [23] (an implementation variant that many of them were familiar with), served more effectively the valuable skills acquisition process (Figure 19b).…”

“…presented in [23] (an implementation variant that many of them were familiar with), served more effectively the valuable skills acquisition process (Figure 19b). presented in [23] (an implementation variant that many of them were familiar with), served more effectively the valuable skills acquisition process (Figure 19b). Finally, it became apparent that the participants believed that the proposed activity was further triggering students' interests and attributes to the skills needed for their future professional careers (Figure 20a) and that activities including similar topics and tasks should be incorporated in the university lessons' curriculum more drastically (Figure 20b).…”

“…In terms of agricultural education, many approaches at the universities are limited to web-enhanced solutions, using ICT technologies as a facilitator for general content delivery [21]. When trying to add the "engineering" term, the higher education practices are based almost on the same miniature electromechanical and power electronic components (e.g., LEDs, tiny DC motors, and cheap low-voltage motor controllers) that are utilized by the typical secondary education laboratory activities [22,23], and thus do not offer realistic enough learning experiences, despite their overall significance. Some other university contributions are focusing rather on the sensing and/or on the visualization software part of indicative agricultural processes [21] than on the acting part, for reasons related to the difficulties of fluently adopting the Precision Agriculture (PA) context [24], or they rely upon industrial modules or robotic platform solutions, such as the ones presented in [25][26][27], that are valuable but quite complex and expensive.…”