Enhancing student participation in a design-centric mechatronics class Andi Sudjana Putra a,⇑ , Jun Jie Ng b , Kok Kiong Tan b , Hwee Choo Liaw a , Kok Zuea Tang a Sunan Huang b , Tong Heng Lee b a Engineering Design and Innovation Centre (EDIC), National University of Singapore (NUS), 1 Engineering Drive 2, Block E1A, #03-03, Singapore 117576, Singapore b Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), National University of Singapore (NUS), Block E4, #05-45, Singapore 117583, Singapore article info Article history: Received 5 May 2012 Revised 19 February 2013 Accepted 22 February 2013 Available online 6 April 2013 Keywords: Mechatronics Smartphone-based Student participation Web-based abstract This paper presents the work to address the problem of student participation in a class. The work is par- ticularly applied to a design-centric mechatronics-related classes, using web, smartphone, and mecha- tronics-related technology. The specific issues to be targeted on are the irregular attendance and the low participation of students during classes using on-the-spot questions and answers on design-centric subjects to improve and adaptively redirect the orientation of targeted students as well as the whole class. The approach and system have been developed with Android smartphone-based application and Apache Tomcat-based server. This allows data storage and opens up possibility for statistical analysis in the future. Ó 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction Advancing personalized learning has been identified as one of the grand engineering challenges of the 21st century [1]. While education experts are debating about pedagogical methodologies and factors affecting their efficiency, there is a general consensus that a significant portion depends on the students themselves; hence, enforcing the need of personalized learning methodology [2]. This, in fact, is the base of adult teaching (andragogy) [3,4], which places motivation as a core value [5]. A significant portion of engineering student participation – which may also be true with other disciplines – is identifiable from student attendance. Research indicates some degree of association between attendance and performance, the magnitude of which is highlighted in several studies [6]. Many of the reasons given by students are valid (such as family emergencies and illness), yet quite a number are trivial, which give rise to questions of student’s level of appreciation to the contact time with a lecturer. Studies [6] also reveal that the following reasons contribute to students not participating in a class: a. Competing assignments and commitments. b. Failure to connect the content of the lecture to their assess- ment to the ‘real world’. c. Availability of the lecture material online. Our work is aimed at addressing the issue of student participa- tion in a class. We employ two-stage strategy to address this prob- lem as follows: 1. Getting the students to come (attendance): Getting the students to appreciate that coming to the lectures is a commitment is the first step that we attempt to do, by developing a system to track student attendance and to make them aware that it is indeed being monitored. Although applied to all students in a class, this effort is mainly targeted to the students with irregular attendance. 2. Getting the students to participate (engagement): The subse- quent, integral effort is to get the students to participate in the class – and therefore developing an intrinsic motivation to be in a class [7] without undue reward [8]. Student attention to a subject depends on the student and on the subject. While classification of students may not be useful due to the impracticality of predicting the type of students who will enroll to a class, classification of subjects is necessary to design the appropriate approach in strengthening student engagement [9]. The undergraduate engineering curriculum that we are target- ing comprises of modules that are generally classified into engi- neering science modules (such as mathematics and engineering core modules) and engineering application modules (such as engi- neering design project). In this paper, we take a close look at a de- sign-centric mechatronics class, i.e. an engineering application module; which the authors of this paper have been teaching. 0957-4158/$ - see front matter Ó 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.mechatronics.2013.02.009 ⇑ Corresponding author. Tel.: +65 6601 1358. E-mail address: engpas@nus.edu.sg (A.S. Putra). Mechatronics 23 (2013) 918–925 Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect Mechatronics journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/mechatronics