Using Smartphones Physical Interfaces in Engineering Education: Experiences in Promoting Student Motivation and Learning

Abstract

Smartphones are already taking part of the everyday life of more than two and a half billion people. University students are one of the population groups in which smartphone penetration is more intense. Applications for activities organization, voting, translation, information sharing, flashcarding, etc. are already of general use. However, despite the considerable big number of available data acquisition and analysis applications, few learning activities take advantage of the smartphone physical interfacing capabilities (accelerometers, gyroscopes, magnetometer, microphone, camera, flashlight, loudspeaker), which, due to the present computing power of smartphones, are excellent. This leads to infer that smartphones could be a relevant tool for enhancing the teaching-learning process in technical studies. Students attending to engineering careers are an especially adequate target for smartphone aided teaching due to their training in the use of computers and other electronic equipment and their strong previous knowledge in fields as programming or quantitative data management. In this work, the data acquisition capability of smartphones is studied, different teaching-learning activities based on this capability are proposed, and the impact of the introduction of three representative smartphone-based learning activities, as balancing of shafts, evaluation of stick-slip instabilities or machine acoustic power measurement, is analyzed.