Upgrading an educative hydraulic test stand into a digital media

Abstract

For the author, it has been a teaching concern how to encourage engineering students to grasp and improve their understanding of technical concepts such as parallel-series hydraulic pumping. The interest that students have in the Internet provides windows of opportunities to link such interest with our teaching concern through a new technology. A fully developed concept is presented herein on how to convert the ordinary twentieth-century hydraulic test stand into a modern digital media source, taking into account the cognition, metacognition and motivation aspects that are requisites for an effective learning process. Minimal hardware modifications, software development as well as the several paths used by the students to access the interactive content design, using the Internet, have turned the hydraulic centrifugal pump stand into an educational tool. A first pilot test made with fifty-three students indicated a high percent level of positive acceptance.