Valuable experience in engineering laboratory: Enhance understanding of engineering concepts

Abstract

Experience in an engineering laboratory is important for engineering students and likely to enhance understanding of engineering concepts for which they have learned the theory. Although the aim of the laboratory is an opportunity to learn and gain experience, we do not know much about what actually happens in a typical laboratory class. The development of experience either intentionally or unintentionally, will happen when the students are performing tasks in the laboratory. We distinguish explicit learning related to the stated learning objectives from other learning of implicit knowledge, tacit knowledge and practical intelligence which we refer to as unintentional learning. Through their laboratory experience, they may possibly be able to detect and solve problems or diagnose faults in the equipment. The purpose of this research is to explore links between unintentional learning and experience in laboratory with practical intelligence relating to the ability to diagnose equipment faults. Proposed methodologies for this research are described in this paper