MULTIPURPOSE MOBILE HP LABORATORY FOR SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING STUDENTS

Students' retention remains one of the main challenges in Science and Engineering education. Often, students experience a lack of connection to the material taught in class and, as a result, gradually lose motivation and interest in the course. Technology-enhanced learning has a potential to shift the classroom environment from professor-centered to student-centered, thus improving student learning outcomes. At Ryerson, we frequently experiment with various technologies to support active learning. The electronic pen and screen capture technologies utilized in the tablet personal computers open up new exciting opportunities in teaching Science, Mathematics, Engineering and Technology (SMET) disciplines. Thanks to the generous HP Educational Technology Initiative grant, we have been able to create HP Multipurpose Mobile Science Laboratory for our students in Sciences and Engineering Programs. Since the Fall 2008, tablet PCs have been used in our second year Modern Physics and third year Electricity and Magnetism courses. The tablets allowed us to create collaborative studiostyle environment blending together lecture and tutorial where the students can annotate instructor's lectures, collaborate on problem solving, run applets and simulations, and submit their work. In-class use of tablets significantly increases student-instructor communication. We have recently expanded the use of tablets to offer selected laboratory assignments. We use tablet PCs to create Camtasia mini-lessons on selected particularly challenging topics of the undergraduate curriculum. We believe that the tablet inking and screen capturing capabilities have largely unexplored potential to engage the students in active learning in SMET courses. This work is being supported by HP Innovations in Education Initiative.