From left: Kathleen Meehan and Cortney Martin at the meeting of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department Heads Association March 13-14, 2011

March 21, 2011 — ECE associate professor Kathleen Meehan presented the department’s Lab-in-a-box equipment and curriculum at the March meeting of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department Heads Association (ECEDHA) in Phoenix, Arizona. She was joined at the meeting by Cortney Martin of the Virginia Tech Center for Instructional Development and Education Research (CIDER).

Lab-in-a-Box is the name for a personal laboratory kit developed by a team of ECE faculty and first used in the curriculum in 2004. The kit can be used anywhere and was developed to give students hands-on experience and to encourage exploration and experimentation outside the classroom-laboratory.

Meehan developed the kit together with Robert Hendricks of the Mechanical Science & Engineering department, Peter Doolittle of CIDER, and Richard Clark, Jr., of Virginia Western Community College. The project has received two funding awards from the NSF and support from the ECE department.

Four ECE courses currently include the kit, and the lab manual, written by Meehan and Hendricks, will go into its fourth edition later this year.

Read more about the Lab-in-a-box in the 2009 ECE Annual Report.