Work in progress - breaking free of the laboratory using PDAs

Laboratory experiences are often contrived and limited in scope by resources. Additionally, students often fail to transfer the knowledge gained in the laboratory to ¿real world¿ systems. At many institutions, lecture courses are linked to laboratories that may or may not be taken within the same semester, making it a challenge to insure concepts learned in lecture are mastered by practice in lab. A novel approach is needed to widen the breadth and flexibility experimental problems to increase students´ proficiency and knowledge transfer. Moreover, this approach should facilitate exposing students to laboratory experiences temporally closer to the time in the lecture sequence when they are learning the pertinent concepts. To this end, PDA-enabled laboratory experiences have been piloted at the University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) and are being implemented at the University of Texas-Pan American (UTPA) using the National Instruments´ LabVIEW PDA module and off-the-self sensors.