Home Lab kits: a COVID anomaly or a learning innovation to promote ‘playful’ Engineering? Reflections on their development, delivery, and impact on learning

Teaching core laboratory practical skills of investigation, instrumentation, and measurement, together with the processes of data collection, analysis, and reporting, is widely accepted to be essential in the early years of STEM undergraduate degree courses. However, access to on-campus facilities were severely restricted during the COVID-19 pandemic, significantly impacting on students’ experiences in this core skills area.
In the early summer of 2020, the School of Civil, Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering (CAME) at the University of Bristol swiftly partnered with RS Components to develop a personal home lab kit to support a wholly distance-learning practical unit for around 600 first year students. The rapid deployment of an internationally couriered lab kit solution created a few logistical difficulties which are touched on in this paper.
Whilst students clearly would have preferred access to the normal lab environment, several positive affordances of the personal lab kits were observed. The teaching team noted, and encouraged, notable reduction in the treatment of measurement and instrumentation devices as ‘black boxes’, significantly enhanced opportunity for creativity and playful inquisition, and an emphasis on the development of effective experimental reporting.
Although initially conceived to provide an immediate solution to restricted access to labs, the kits provide significant benefits in low-stakes exploration of practical engineering lab problems. This has led to the decision to roll these out into a ‘post-pandemic’ future, where they will be used to augment traditional lab activities to provide a richer learning experience.