Surely one cannot provide students with meaningful hands-on learning experience through packets of information sent over the internet, processed in a server and received on a computer. Some things in life are meant to work best when tangible. One such thing is learning enabled by the laboratory.

Worried by the barrier in hands-on learning, Dr. Jahangir Ikram and his team, with support from the Electrical Engineering (EE) Department Chair, worked hard to successfully develop low-cost kits for students, to continue learning even outside of the lab, from the comfort of their homes. It is fair to say that Dr. Jahangir and team made the lab come to the students rather than vice versa.

Each kit contains a variety of necessary tools including micro controllers, LED matrix, programmable chips, and digital to analog converter, an oscilloscope, power distribution core, a complete tool set, multimeter, speed controllers and motors. The oscilloscopes had to be imported from China to meet the goal of making the kit cheaper, more affordable.

In the heat and humidity of the past three months, 50 kits were successfully developed and Dr. Jahangir’s team had gone to lengths with making sure no compromise was made in quality and effectiveness of the kits. The kits will be used for the EE 324 course that focuses on micro controllers interfacing and assembly language program.

We congratulate Dr. Jahangir and his department on leading this initiative and appreciate his interest in extending technical support to other universities in case they’d like to replicate this project.