Household Appliances Identification: Hands-On Integrative Workshop and Its Adaptation to a Social Distancing Context

Theoretical and practical knowledge integration is essential in Electrical Engineering. Throughout the degree, students must tackle specific problems where they can put into practice difficult concepts and test their learning. Taking this into consideration, an integrative workshop is implemented in the third year that seeks to strengthen skills such as: analysis and design of signal conditioning circuits, designing and printing circuits, signal acquisition and processing, pattern recognition and classification, integration of a system. The workshop is based on the topic of load identification which is a challenging problem, suitable for developing multiple electrical engineering concepts and also an interesting subject for the initiation of the students to research. This article shares the 2019 edition experience and its adaptation to non-classroom classes in 2020 in the context of social distancing restrictions due the coronavirus disease. The 2019 didactic proposal and the necessary modifications for 2020 are presented and analyzed. Although losing the fruitful interaction between teachers and students in the lab in 2020, most of the hands-on activities could be maintained helped by the use of USB oscilloscopes/analyzers that give students the functionality of a lab at home. It is concluded that both editions, in spite of their different teaching modalities, achieved good academic results.