Work in progress: Multi-faceted penetration of fast fourier transform by interactively analyzing real-world objects via mobile technology

Recent research shows that the engineering students have problems connecting the required computation to a conceptual understanding, as well as translating a graphical understanding of the process to a symbolic mathematical representation, especially when handling the multiple steps of the procedures. The students are usually able to perform sequences of the underlying calculations but cannot piece together the higher conceptual relationship that drives these procedures. This work-in-progress paper presents a viable approach and a new teaching and learning paradigm to enhance the effectiveness of teaching fast Fourier transform and significantly improve the learning outcomes. By integrating the mobile and cloud computing technologies, we are developing a handheld real-world relevance laboratory that includes an integrated learning module for Fourier transform and a shared intelligent project repository to host the module and real-world relevant data. This development is expected to overcome the intellectual inaccessibility of transform techniques and tackle the challenges in existing approaches: the prohibitive cost of project-based approach; limited access and real-world relevance data in simulation-based approach, and unreliable and unsustainable support.