Promoting student engagement in undergraduate science electronics labs with the use of a low-cost, standalone, microcontroller-based learning platform

Encouraging student engagement is a key aim in any educational setting. Allowing students the freedom to pursue their own methods of solving problems through independent experimentation has been shown to markedly improve this. In many contexts, however, allowing students this flexibility in their learning is hampered by constraints of the material itself, such as in the electronics laboratory, where expensive equipment confines the learning environment to the laboratory room. To address this, we present the development of a low-cost, portable electronics learning platform, the WinterLab board and software interface, designed for use in an introductory science undergraduate electronics course. The platform is comparable or lower in cost than a typical textbook, fits in the palm of the hand, connects to the user's computer via USB, and incorporates all equipment used in a typical undergraduate electronics laboratory. The WinterLab platform was given to a subset of students in the 2019 edition of an electronics and signal processing second year undergraduate course, who used it to complete the course's laboratory curriculum. Students' reception of the board was positive, and several requested to keep the board beyond the end of the semester for use in personal projects. Equipping students with a low-cost test and measurement platform, such as the WinterLab board, that can be used at home and kept after the end of the course represents an accessible avenue for improving engagement in electronics learning at the science undergraduate level.