Innovations for Laboratory Sessions in Engineering: Pre-lab H5P Videos and Reporting Results Through ad hoc Applications

The use of digital tools was introduced in the laboratory teaching of different engineering subjects. Before the laboratory sessions, the students must watch interactive videos created with H5P technology and answer the different questions inserted in them. After the face-to-face sessions, the students must process the experimental data by using applications developed for this purpose in MATLAB, with the aim that students could focus more on learning the concepts and less on the repetitive calculations. The delivery of results by written reports is replaced by encoded Excel files exported from these programs. They also contain some minigames to perform simple simulations related with the work. The overall improvement of the pass rates of the practical exercises with respect to the traditional methodology was around 21% the first year. According to different surveys, the students had a good appreciation of this methodology, rating it higher than 4.3 in a scale up to 5.