摘要：Engineering laboratories have long been a valued element within the higher education curriculum, providing an effective learning vehicle that is popular with students. Unfortunately they can be expensive for academics to operate and assess, and time-consuming for the students who undertake them. This paper describes one possible approach to make laboratory activities more efficient by activating the traditional instruction sheet using Microsoft Word documents and their companion Visual Basic for Applications development environment.Experiments in basic electrical science have been activated in a trial. The main additional features provided include built-in help, formative feedback, and automated assessment. For those with previous Visual Basic or general computing experience a relatively modest development effort is required.Evaluation has taken place with a large class of foundation year students. By careful observation of the development process and trial operation, together with student views expressed through a questionnaire and informally, the merits of the approach have been considered. Positive observations include improved assessment efficiency for staff and a productive learning experience for students. On the negative side, technical issues, associated with the information technology infrastructure and the robustness of the assessment, are concerns. Given a sympathetic environment the technique may have potential for wider adoption.
