Skill Development of Students through Hands-On Workshop

Abstract

Nowadays, lot of focus is given to innovative teaching and learning methodologies. The aim of this paper is to engage and motivate the students for lifelong learning. Moreover, it is also necessary to enhance the skills of the students. Keeping this objective in mind, hands-on workshop was organized for the third year engineering students of Electronics branch of the institute. The workshop was aimed to enhance hands-on skills among the students. The workshop also focused on boosting the confidence level of the weak students in the class. Equal number of bright and weak students were selected for this workshop. The students were identified by considering few parameters such as performance in pre-requisite theory course, performance in pre-requisite laboratory course, performance in pre-requisite knowledge test, and feedback from the mentor. It is observed that the weak students outperformed bright students in hands-on skills assignment. Weak students showed enthusiasm while performing hands-on than solving theoretical assignment. Whereas few bright students couldn’t speed up with weak students in hands-on but they were interested in solving theoretical assignments. It was also observed that students gave overwhelming response in solving open ended design assignment and its implementation. This assignment has attained the highest level of Bloom’s taxonomy. This study concludes that performance of the students depends on their interest. In future, students can be categorized in three levels as bright, average and weak and suitable activities can be planned for their skills development.