Adapting through a Pandemic: Creating a Hands-On Mechatronics Laboratory with Project Team-Based Collaboration for Remote Learning.

This paper introduces a hands-on laboratory curriculum for an undergraduate mechatronics course that delivers a team-based collaborative student experience for remote learning. COVID-19 pandemic created unexpected challenges for educators, where in-person teachings had to quickly transition to remote learning. This significantly impacted learning outcomes for handson laboratory courses by students not having access to laboratory equipment and the difficulty to follow the education practice "learn by doing" in the confines of their home. A remote laboratory curriculum is introduced with a series of hands-on mechatronic labs. Three individual student labs introduce how to operate a microcontroller, process infrared sensor signals, and program digital communication displays. Then two team-based collaborative labs explore how students can transmit/receive signals to control a servo using an ESP32 microcontroller with wireless communication over a bi-directional shared server. Then a course project on remote teleoperation is introduced for student-to-student collaboration at home. The learning experience gave students insight into a growing technological area, where teleoperation is in such fields as in-home healthcare, space and ocean exploration, and human-machine collaboration. Student survey results provided positive feedback on their ability to meet project requirements with the challenges of being at home instead of having an in-person learning environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]