DOLFFEN: Discovery Oriented Lab For First-Year Engineers

The DOLFFEN project is a school and NSF sponsored effort to develop a hands-on laboratory course that will: (1) Instill same excitement and interest in students with respect to true experimentation and (2) Remedy in some degree the vast well of ignorance modern students have about the way real devices anal systems work, what they are made of, and (3) Demonstrate how technological artifacts exploit scientific principles to create useful devices and systems. From the point of view of educational philosophy, the course is constructivist in the sense that what students learn is a product of their exploration and inferences they draw from their results. There is no received wisdom and no theory to be validated. The lab writeups studiously avoid imperative sentences and primarily consist of questions to be answered by experiment. This approach is a deliberate attack on the formulaic, prescriptive lab protocols to which most undergraduate labs have sunk and which have been the cause of students´ contempt for what parses as experimentation on our campuses. For the faculty, the approach is a tradeoff between coverage, depth, contact with the theory or base of knowledge and conveying the real sense of exploration or discovery that makes laboratory work so pleasurable and important. The tradeoff is like the one we make when we choose to prepare a dinner from a new recipe in the newspaper as opposed to irradiating a TV dinner. The latter is neat, predictable and convenient but not very tasty. The former is risky usually disappointing in some respects but always exciting and educational. In this paper some example experiments are described and results from a pilot of offering are given. The early results are encouraging and some lessons about student interests and capabilities have been learned