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Integration of Web-based Arduino/circuits Simulator in Enhancing Future Engineering Student Projects

As COVID-19 impacts made the learning environment difficult in the 2020-2021 school year, educators quickly adopted new methods of instruction to deal with COVID lock-downs and the inability of most students to return to the classroom environment. These impacts were felt nowhere more strongly than in the realms of engineering education and practical lab instruction. By their very nature, engineers build things and a central tenet of modern engineering pedagogy is that students should be directly involved in the building process. When students are isolated from their classrooms and workshop build spaces, and are instead restricted to an online working environment, suitable alternatives must be found. Conventional solutions, like the ubiquitous “Zoom class” are only of limited value in courses that place an emphasis on practical arts and hands-on procedures. This paper constitutes a case study of a set of online tools, particularly TinkerCAD, used to conduct a lab class in an online environment when in-person instruction was not available as an option. An implementation of a web-based Arduino and circuits simulator is discussed that led to not only a successful transition to online lab course instruction, but also showed a great potential for being integrated into student-built satellite projects in the future. The paper also discusses how this tool can be integrated into student-built satellite projects, enabling faster and more stable development of the future CubeSats and other hardware-in-the-loop projects in the future. © 2022, American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics Inc.. All rights reserved.