Portable Laboratory for Electrical Engineering Education: The LAB-VEE Ecosystem Developed in Latin America and the Caribbean

Abstract

The need for options that allow the quality of education to be guaranteed even outside educational institutions has intensified in the last 3 years due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In the case of engineering, several universities have initiated or increased efforts to mitigate the effects resulting from students taking electrical engineering classes from their homes without access to laboratories. Thanks to this, remote laboratories have been created that allow students to conduct experiments from their homes. Other universities have been working on the creation of portable laboratories that students can take home and conduct experiments as if they were in a traditional laboratory. In this article, we present in detail the process carried out by a group of researchers from a university in the Dominican Republic for the creation of a portable electrical engineering laboratory that incorporates many the necessary equipment for a laboratory of this type. The creation of this laboratory emerged as a Research, Development and Innovation (R&D&I) project that was financed in the period 2018-2021 by the Ministry of Higher Education, Science and Technology (MESCyT) in collaboration with the Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology (KAIST) and the Korea International Cooperation Agency (KOICA) with an approximate budget of US$103,000. The interest of the research team was to create equipment that would complement or replace most of the equipment used in an electricity laboratory and that would be low-cost. With the arrival of the pandemic, a redesign was carried out, becoming a portable laboratory that students can transport in their backpacks and at a lower cost than the existing options on the market. To date, it has received 2 injections of capital totaling more than US$28,000 from banking and governmental institutions, and recently the research team has been approved for more than US$200,000 to continue research and development in the field. The production cost is around US$250 and is expected to decrease further. To date, 3 professors, 10 students, and a company have participated in this project. A company called LAB-VEE Educational TechMaker has been created for commercialization and an LMS with didactic content. The LMS was implemented in 2021 by a school in the country, with more than 60 students taking classes, having access to only theoretical content. A study was conducted on this implementation to measure the level of learning of these students compared to others who studied in a traditional way, and recently a university in the country has implemented LAB-VEE to conduct a study that will allow them to know its impact on the academic performance of university students.