Work in progress — Enhancing students learning through instructional videos during hands-on laboratories on renewable energy sources

At the University of California Santa Cruz, a renewable energy sources course is a theory based course that includes six hands-on laboratory experiments. The course is designed for engineering and non-engineering undergraduate students and does not require any advanced mathematics or physics background. Each laboratory experiment introduces a miniature version of an energy conversion device that mimics the insights and workings of a real scale device. The hands-on laboratory experiments illustrate principles of the; solar pathfinder, flywheel, hydroelectricity, wind turbine, thermoelectricity and a fuel cell. In the past, each laboratory consisted of paper based instructions, pre and post questionnaires and a laboratory kit. Since many students in the class were non-science majors and had difficulty following the paper based instructions, we substituted the paper based instructions with instructional videos to ease the kit assembly and enhance student learning by providing more time to focus on the data gathering and analysis processes by minimizing the assembly time. The instructional videos demonstrate the experimental set-up and a method for collecting the data during each hands-on experiment. This work in progress paper presents description of our methods.