Unintentional experience: an important aspect of engineering `hands-on' laboratories?

Abstract

Experience in an engineering laboratory is an important element for engineering students and likely to enhance engineering concepts, which they have learned theoretically. Although the aim of the laboratory is giving opportunities to learn and gain experience, we do not know what actually happens in the laboratory. The development of experience either intentionally or unintentionally, will happen when the students are 'doing' the laboratory. Through their experience, they may possibly be able to detect and solve problems or easily diagnose faults of the equipment. Gaining knowledge and experience unintentionally are believed to play an important role in laboratory work. However, the question is, do the students who gain experience during their laboratory classes possess a high level of unintentional knowledge which allow them to diagnose the faults of equipment easily. Therefore, the aim of this research is to explore unintentional experience gained by students after attending laboratory experiments. In the first part of this research, the students were observed individually during the experiments and they were involved in an informal interview. Through the observation and interview, it was predicted that the students would gain unintentional experience and knowledge when they were doing the experiments. Thus in the second part, the related experience, i.e the ability to recognize basic knowledge of mechanical (and electronic) parts and activities, was explored by an on-line multimedia survey. The students answered the survey twice, before and after attending the laboratory experiments and the results of these surveys show the difference in scores between pre and post. The students gained a higher score in the post survey, and it is predicted that the students had gained the knowledge to answer the post survey through their experience in doing the experiments. Then, for further research, the students will be given an activity to diagnose simple faults which are related to the experiments. In summary, this research is to find the correlation between unintentional experience and knowledge in laboratory with the ability to diagnose equipment faults.