Building a digital application to simulate engineering lab practicals in Kumasi, Ghana

Dr Eric Tutu Tchao is a lecturer in the Department of Computer Engineering at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST). He has been teaching with the department for over eight years.

Dr Tchao teaches basic electronics to different classes, including students from civil engineering, geomatics, and geological engineering. Most classes have over 200 students and all of them are required to undertake lab sessions. The electrical engineering labs only have around 15 computers, so it is difficult to accommodate classes of that size. “Just look at the numbers,” he says, “if you had to run lab schedules for them, look at how long it would take!” Students are supposed to go about five times within a semester but some are only able to go once

Dr Tchao decided to change the way he was teaching the course. He thought it would be better if there was an online version of the labs, where the students could practice with a system. This is how the e-lab came into being. Dr Tchao built a JavaScript application which allows students to access practical experiments online, and which runs on a mobile. “We’ve translated it onto a software kind of thing,” he explains, “so you go, you play with it — transistors, transformers, all those things, how to build radio sets… it’s given a feel, it is personalising learning.”

Students create a profile in the application, and then work through a series of activities, such as how to build a radio set. “So basically, what we do is build an amplifier,” he explains, “you put together some transistors, arrange them, you calculate their gauge, you feed in a signal at some point, measure it, feed in an impulse and measure it, if it works, then your system works.” Student feedback on the system has been positive.

For Dr Tchao innovation doesn’t have to be something that causes a “wow” — it is simply about contributing to the development of a field, or something that can make life easier.

The labs have reduced stress, he explains: “Currently, the first years are doing engineering technology and their numbers are huge. So if we schedule lab sessions, it goes way into 6 pm and the technicians complain… if we are able to extend my application to cover this engineering technology, no need to stress the technicians.”

The university’s response has been mixed. In the chemistry department it was simply treated as a project. “After the students were done with their project, it’s been kept on the shelf,” he says. He is concerned that once the pressures of the pandemic have gone away, the impetus to invest in technology for teaching will also wane.

Dr Tchao says students spend so much time with their phones, that investigating how apps can be used in learning makes a lot of sense, and that it good be valuable at high school as well as university level. “Gamification is the way to go, people like games,” he says, “so if you translate whatever they are doing in the form of games — something that they like, they’ll stick to it.”

The growth in student numbers has been a strong motivator for Dr Tchao, especially given the widening student to lecturer ratio that it brings, but the availability of technology has been important too. “There is access to these digital systems are there, we have a server that is online that we can use most of our application. So, if the resources are available, why won’t it motivate me to do some of these things?”

But the unreliability of power is a problem and could dissuade students. “If someone is using my application, and the server is down, he will not come back to use it again,” says Dr Tchao. “Our online learning system, V-Class, when we have an online class, they go and the system is down. Nobody will use it again.” There are also many “BBC teachers” he explains — “Born Before Computer” — who are used to doing things manually.

He is nevertheless optimistic. There are skilled programmers in Ghana, and he believes that some policymakers are also starting to understand the need to invest more in technology for education. The pandemic was of course important, he says: “Covid is also an enabler whether we like it or not, because now everybody now understands that everything has to be made digital.”

Dr Tchao thinks that if they can introduce some of these tools for instructors who teach lab-based courses, it will raise awareness and give them a feel for what is possible “Some of our lecturers don’t know [about it]m so if we introduce them to it, they might buy in.” If they do, he says, then it won’t be difficult for computing specialists to translate their lab activities into digital form.

Interview conducted by Richard Bruce Lamptey, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science & Technology.