Enhancing Student Engagement in Unit Operations Laboratory through Augmented Reality - Volume 11 Issue 4

Oct 15, 2026

Uploaded by Đào

A chemical engineering student’s understanding of theory, experimental design, and real processes is tested and strengthened in Unit Operations laboratory courses. Instructors face constraints such as limited in-lab time, insufficient resources, and growing class sizes, further intensified by COVID-19 safety and distancing requirements. The work evaluates technological approaches that improve equipment familiarization, operation, and safety before and during class, using remote controlled cameras, web interfaces, and augmented reality, with effectiveness measured through post-course surveys and student feedback.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages17

Reading Time43 min

AccessFree to download

Introduction

Augmented reality as an educational tool

Unit Operations course context

Technology strategy and evaluation

| | Ad | vances in Engineering Edu | cation | | | | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 2023: VOLUME 11 ISSUE 4 DOI: 10.18260/3-1-1153-36052 Enhancing Student Engagement in Unit Operations Laboratory through Augmented Reality JACOB C. CRISLIP ESAI LOPEZ CAMERON D. ARMSTRONG TAYLOR PETELL LAILA ABU-LAIL ANDREW R. TEIXEIRA Department of Chemical Engineering Worcester Polytechnic Institute Worcester, Massachusetts 01609 United States ABSTRACT A chemical engineering student’s knowledge of theory, experimental design, and real-world processes is tested and enforced in the Unit Operations laboratory courses. However, instructors are facing challenges of delivering high-quality, hands-on laboratory content with limited resources and increasingly large class sizes. Limited in-lab time is often inefficiently allocated to individualized instruction, which broadly diminishes students’ opportunity for learning by restricting the quantity of data they are able to collect. In addition, teaching in-person laboratories with social distancing measures during the pandemic posed significant logistical and safety challenges and required alternative techniques to be explored and adapted. The technological strategies implemented in this work aimed to manage laboratory course content more efficiently by enhancing familiarization, operation, and safety of lab equipment during and prior to class time. This work demonstrates the evolution of several technological tools that evaluated synchronous hybrid lab offerings and asynchronous prelab training using remote controlled cameras, web-interfaces, and augmented reality. The effectiveness of the implemented technologies was assessed via post course surveys and both negative and positive students’ responses were discussed. Key words: Mixed Reality, Experiential Learning, Remote Laboratory 2023: VOLUME 11 ISSUE 4 41 ADVANCES IN ENGINEERING EDUCATION Enhancing Student Engagement in Unit Operations Laboratory through Augmented Reality INTRODUCTION The Chemical Engineering Unit Operations (UO) course is the culmination of the chemical engineering curriculum, bridging the gap from classroom theory to the real-world industrial processes (Ballesteros et al. 2021) . In the laboratory course, students participate in various stages of experiential learning including conceptualization and experimentation followed by reflection, analysis, and interpretation of data (Miller et al. 1998) . Students apply the theory learned from other courses to enforce the underlying principles at play (Abu-Khalaf 2001) . While equations of conservation of mass and heat transfer always hold, their conceptual and quantitative adoption to real processes must first be reconciled with the physical actions of rotating a valve or reading a temperature gauge before the content is mastered (Miller et al. 1998) . Maintaining this safe and dynamic learning environment demands infrastructure, significant training, time, and resources (Carter et al. 2019) . These factors challenge educators to effectively deliver resource-intensive course content, especially in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic as instructors urgently transitioned to either a fully virtual or limited hybrid instruction to mitigate the disruption (Jimenez et al. 2002) . Chemical engineering departments around the world brought forth several solutions to foster engaging UO experiences: in-person de-densification (Luks 2021), hybrid in-person and synchronous remote lab teams (Maxson 2021), recorded asynchronous videos of instructor-run experiments for remote observation (Dietrich et al. 2020), and completely virtual simulations of lab experiments (Dua, 2021; Elkhatat & Al, 2021) . Notably, many of these solutions came at the sacrifice of experiential learning, an element that has proven to be most effective through in person labs (Wiesner and Lan 2004), followed by simulations (Glassey and Magalhães 2020), an

FAQs

What challenges do instructors face in Unit Operations laboratory courses?

They must deliver hands-on laboratory content with limited resources and increasingly large class sizes, and limited in-lab time often reduces individualized instruction and data collection opportunities. COVID-19 added logistical and safety difficulties that required new techniques.

How does the work use augmented reality to support lab learning?

Augmented reality overlays a virtual space onto the learner’s real environment and anchors holograms to real-world structures. This enables a mixed-reality experience that improves engagement through interaction with AR functionalities.

How is the effectiveness of the implemented technologies assessed?

Effectiveness is evaluated using post-course surveys, along with discussion of students’ negative and positive responses.

Oct 15, 2026

Uploaded by Đào