Enhancing student participation in a design-centric mechatronics class

This paper presents the work to address the problem of student participation in a class. The work is particularly applied to a design-centric mechatronics-related classes, using web, smartphone, and mechatronics-related technology. The specific issues to be targeted on are the irregular attendance and the low participation of students during classes using on-the-spot questions and answers on design-centric subjects to improve and adaptively redirect the orientation of targeted students as well as the whole class. The approach and system have been developed with Android smartphone-based application and Apache Tomcat-based server. This allows data storage and opens up possibility for statistical analysis in the future.