Microcontroller-based Titration for Remote Lab

Laboratory courses are an essential part of the higher education of natural scientists and engineers. Efforts to make university teaching more sustainable and digital are leading to changes in this area. Digital laboratories or laboratories with digital elements can enable more flexible learning, but also require a higher degree of self-organization on the part of the students. This paper shows the development of a digital setup for titrations, a common laboratory method of quantitative chemical analysis. The pedagogical concept regarding learning outcomes, learning method and examination is presented and the first steps of the technical realization of the setup are shown. In addition, initial feedback is presented from students regarding the application of such a titration setup and how they feel about using it.

I. Introduction

Laboratory experiments are feasible to address a lot of fundamental objectives for engineering education. Feisel and Rosa [1] define 13 fundamental objectives of engineering instructional laboratories: 1. Instrumentation, 2. Models, 3. Experiment, 4. Data Analysis, 5. Design, 6. Learn from Failure, 7. Creativity, 8. Psychomotor, 9. Safety, 10. Communication, 11. Teamwork, 12. Ethics in the Laboratory, and 13. Sensory Awareness. The "laboratory of tomorrow" in process engineering needs employees with the competence to continuously record and evaluate chemical-physical data and to operate processes automatically and in a cross-reality way, e.g. remotely. These skills must therefore already be taught in higher education. The function and importance of laboratory courses in engineering education to prepare future engineers for these challenges has already been described. [2] The learning outcomes within these objectives vary in complexity depending on the laboratory experiment. In Bloom‘s taxonomy, the cognitive domain is divided into six levels of objectives: 1. Knowledge, 2. Comprehension, 3. Application, 4. Analysis, 5. Synthesis, and 6. Evaluation. Higher levels include all lower levels. [3]