Take Home Lab as a chance for practical experience and problem based learning in a remote working situation

This contribution shows, how a practically oriented lab experience can be realized even under pandemic conditions by offering low cost “take home labs”, which allow real, practical, and hands-on experience by bringing the lab home and letting students work on experiments. To ensure success, the lab material was well prepared, and the students were tutored via conference tools. The authors present solutions and experiences for two different skill levels. Freshmen in electrical engineering learned to set up electrical circuits on individual bread boards with low-cost equipment, while experienced students in mechanical engineering, had to design, build, and put into practice a “handheld test rig”, based on strain gauges, a cheap amplifier, and Arduino, for a freely chosen research task.