Kate LaBore, Center for Innovation in Teaching and Learning
Fall 2014
IOLab Kit
Rationale
Professor Mats A. Selen and his colleague Professor Tim Stelzer at the University of Illinois Department of Physics, are the creators of the i>Clicker, now used by over 10,000 students at Illinois as well as other campuses such as Purdue, Loyola, Michigan, Wisconsin, Cornell, and Carnegie Mellon. Professors Selens and Stelzer built on their successful experience developing, testing, and using emerging technologies in their own classrooms when they identified the need for a new portable learning tool, the IOLab kit.
The IOLab developed out of Prof. Selen’s recognition that students taking introductory courses often have difficulty mastering physics concepts, yet instructors have limited time to teach challenging and complex concepts in the traditional classroom. Further, the financial resources needed to establish and maintain traditional physics laboratories for every student can be exorbitant. Lastly, with the growing popularity of online courses, there is a need for effective online labs. IOLab addresses all these challenges by bringing the physics lab experience and learning benefits to students in an engaging, cost-effective and portable manner.
Mats Selen IOLab Overview
Description
The IOLab (Interactive Online Lab) is built around a low-cost, easy-to-use, all-purpose handheld device that performs a variety of functions for both introductory and advanced physics courses. The device consists of two components. A wireless battery-powered box, the size of a graphing calculator, containing a small computer, a radio chip and a variety of sensors. The other component contains a receiver and links to a laptop computer through a USB cable. While there are many smartphone apps that provide some of the functions found in IOLab, the kit goes far beyond smartphone capabilities in providing instrumentation for measuring physical phenomena. The IOLab can be used to measure sound, light, acceleration, orientation, magnetic fields, electrical signals, frequency spectra, time constants and more. For example, one could even measure the speed of light merely by being equipped with the IOLab, a piece of scrap aluminum and a ruler.
Motivation
As Principal Investigator on the EnLiST (Entrepreneurial Leadership in STEM Teaching and learning) project, Selen created instructional materials for the EnLiST Physics Summer Institute. The Institute was designed for high school physics teachers interested in learning about GPS and other science activities. The initial motivation was to make the time spent at the Institute enjoyable for teachers. As part of that project, Selen designed activities that used equipment fabricated with gadgets purchased from Texas Instruments. The equipment enabled measurements to be done wirelessly. Because the electronics needed are very cheap, Selen was inspired to build a kit with more functionality.
Mats Selen, How We Teach With It
The initial work with EnLiST, and the collaboration between Selen and his colleagues Timothy J. Stelzer and Gary E. Gladding as part of a course using software called smartPhysics, served as the foundation for the IOLab kit. The team is developing materials consisting of software and a set of activities on different topics to accompany the kit. The first prototype of the IOLab was built in the basement of Selen’s home.
According to Selen, the support of McMillan Publishing has been critical to the development of the hardware and software components of the system. The goal is to develop a kit that can be sold online commercially early next year, at an affordable price, which can be used for physics labs at any institution. Selen would like to make it open source, so that students can take it apart, make changes, and re-write code. Similar to the Arduino platform, a community would ideally form around it: people sharing ideas and developing new ways of using it for different applications.
Instructional Design and Pedagogy
The IOLab gives students the opportunity to engage in hands-on activities virtually anywhere and at their own pace as part of their lecture preparation. When coupled with smartPhysics online lab materials, the IOLab has the potential to promote active learning.
The IOLab kit can be used for courses ranging from introductory to advanced. According to Selen, the harder you look at any experiment, the more you will find things you don’t understand due to a shallow level of understanding of the concept. For example, if you hang this kit from a spring and it goes up and down, the gross feature you might talk about in freshman physics is simple harmonic motion. The period does not depend upon the amplitude. But if you look closer, you will see it is not a perfect sine wave. It has little wiggles on top, because it was not released perfectly. It would be a more advanced project to understand how the wiggles are coupled. The kit can also be used by students in other disciplines such as premed courses, using additional components such as those for measuring EKG.
Even though the IOLab Kit is coupled with online instructional material, it is designed for both structured and unstructured activities. High school teachers want to use it for an open-ended project. In an ideal lab, students are given a set of experiments to understand basic concepts. The kit can do this, but it can also allow them to do open-ended experiments, explore how things work and enjoy doing science. It introduces an element of play into learning. The IOLab kit can be used for individual activities, smallgroup activities, and potentially, for collaborative activities such as “citizen science” projects, via the Internet.
Mats Selen, Future Directions
Research
Selen is interested in understanding the pedagogical implications of doing hands-on lab with the IOLab kit. Katie Ansell, a graduate student working under Selen in the Department of Physics, is writing her thesis on the advantages of doing hands-on lab activities prior to physics classes. Additional activities are planned within the smartPhysics framework. Preliminary results of clinical studies indicate that students who completed hands-on activities using the IOLab kit and the smartPhysics material performed better than a control group who completed the activities without these materials.
Mats Selen, IOLab Research Across the Disciplines
What’s Next?
The Studio Physics model pioneered at MIT combines lecture, lab and recitation into one. Based on that model, Illinois is building a new lab at Loomis, using a special layout to enable students to work in small groups. There, the lecturer will be able to walk around, show work on wall-mounted displays, initiate discussions with student and help students work on problems. In this new, innovative teaching environment, students and faculty will spend three hours working hands-on problems, engaging in detailed discussions, and conducting experiments with the IOLab device.
Additional Sources
https://insideillinois.info/blog/view/6371/209505