The Hydraulic Analogues of Basic Circuits: Labs for Online Learning Environments

TL;DR

This paper introduces hydraulic analogues as visual and interactive tools for teaching basic electrical circuit concepts in online learning environments, enhancing understanding and addressing misconceptions.

Contribution

It presents new hydraulic analogue labs for online courses that demonstrate circuit principles and provide students with hands-on data collection opportunities.

Findings

Hydraulic analogues effectively illustrate Ohm's law and capacitor charging.

Visual demonstrations help reduce student misconceptions.

The approach is useful both online and in-person.

Abstract

In this paper we describe a couple of exercises that we developed for our online first-year EM course. The labs that we describe are focused on basic concepts from circuit analysis, namely Ohm's law and charging a capacitor with a constant voltage source and a series resistor. To give students a visual demonstration of these concepts and, simultaneously, provide a means for students to collect their own unique dataset, hydraulic analogues of these electric circuits were built and a series of videos were recorded. Incidentally, the visual demonstrations may also help to alleviate some of the commonly-held student misconceptions about basic circuits. For this reason, even once in-person labs resume, we expect that the hydraulic analogue demonstrations will continue to be useful.