LEARNING ELECTRONICS THROUGH STORYTELLING

STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) initiatives have expanded to include ‘art’ withthe moniker: STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Math). This acknowledges the importance of creativity in the technical fields and poses the question: How do we incorporate art into the engineering classroom? This paper presents one attempt to incorporate the artof storytelling in a first-year engineering design course in January 2021. It was found that compared with students who received a traditional lecture to learn basic electronicconcepts, the students who used an illustrated storybook to learn the same concepts took significantly less time to replicate a sample circuit (p < .001), and performed better in a post-activity assessment (p > .05). These results indicate that the use of storytelling can be an effective wayto transmit technical content in an engineering classroom, and further studies should be pursued.

Educational Escape Rooms as an Active Learning Tool for Teaching Telecommunications Engineering

Traditional education, particularly at a university level is not necessarily very engaging. Educational escape rooms are a recent game based learning approach which combines team based problem solving with a story-line and cryptic clues. In this paper, we apply the concept of educational escape rooms to the telecommunications engineering classroom by creating a series of two separate scenarios, each containing three puzzles. Our evaluation is based on survey results from telecommunication experts which suggest that this will be an engaging and challenging tool for teaching telecommunications engineering. Although educational escape rooms are rapidly being deployed in education, these are the first educational escape rooms that specifically addresses the field of telecommunications engineering.