Scientific instrumentation is expensive, and as a result, instructors face significant barriers to implementing instrument-based laboratory experiments.  Unless the class size is small, students are cycled through experiments in a round-robin style, leaving some students at a disadvantage if the theory covered during the lecture portion of the course does not coincide with the application in the lab.  Additionally, having a single instrument makes both student and instructor risk averse, for fear that a broken instrument will result in an entire class missing the opportunity to engage with that particular course content.  The advent of powerful yet inexpensive microcontrollers coupled with benchtop manufacturing such as 3D printing and CNC milling has provided an excellent opportunity to address both of these issues.  Pedagogically relevant instrumentation can be developed at a fraction of the cost of commercial analogs, allowing for example, a lab of twenty students to be equipped with individual potentiostats capable of performing cyclic voltammetry.  In addition, instrumentation can be designed to facilitate exploration of how scientific data are acquired.  Custom made instrumentation promotes risk taking since the costs (both time and financial) of repairing/replacing damaged instruments are greatly reduced.  Students then leave the laboratory with greater confidence in their technical skills and increased awareness in the relationships between scientific instrument design and data integrity.

I’ve got a bad feeling about this: Bespoke instrumentation as a tool to increase student agency

ACS Spring 2022

The official archive and repository for all ACS Meetings & Expositions abstracts and select posters or presentations.