Smartphone-based industrial informatics projects and laboratories

Abstract

The use of IT technologies plays an important role in the training of future engineers. In this paper, smartphones and multimedia technologies are proposed as an innovative way to tackle the formation of students, at different levels, in the Industrial Informatics (II) subject of the Industrial Electronics Engineering (IEE) degree. II instructs future Engineers in the design of IT systems to control industrial processes. In the first level, smartphones are used to display a web-based multimedia tool that is implemented to register the lecture explanations regarding the design of II systems, so as it facilitates student to guide him/her self in the learning process. In the second level, the smartphone is proposed as the control system of a medium size industrial process (e.g., water tank). Since II uses a problem-based learning methodology (miniproject) to instruct the design of II systems, for each lecture, laboratory practices are tackled, and the solutions obtained are embedded in the smartphone to control the corresponding part of the miniproject. An application of the Smartphone multimedia tool is presented to show how students interact with the developed system. The successful evaluation of the proposed tools, by more than 900 IEE students during three years, is shown.