Enhancing practical skills in the electronics classroom with portable labs

Electronics courses in university are of paramount importance in most learning programs within engineering. These are widely taught from the beginning levels in Bachelor's degrees to advanced levels in Master's degrees. In this context, lectures commonly pursue achievement of active learning and comprehension from students, particularly concentrating on the acquisition of practical skills and relevant competences for their professional development. Improvements in such aspects have been extensively reported these days, being principally represented by methodologies sustained by technology and digital resources, in contrast to former methodologies which have been traditionally sustained by face-to-face master classes. In this work, we present a renewed learning program for an electronics course taught in the second level of three different Bachelor's degrees in engineering. The main goal is to facilitate active learning and to enhance the practical skills acquired by students. So far this was conducted through practical and hands-on lessons in the laboratory, however, here we intend to extend practice to the methodology of the theory lessons. To that aim, we have used portable labs during the theory lessons, to support the explanation of theoretic concepts by in situ exemplifications. This was accomplished during the entire schedule of the theory lessons of the course. We present results that validate the suitability of this approach in terms of students' performance and comprehension, but also in terms of satisfaction, as reported by a questionnaire. Extended comparison results are also presented in order to deduce further conclusions.