Laboratory Instruction Enhancement: Utilizing QR Codes and Digital Resources in Introductory STEM Courses

Lab activities are integral to introductory STEM courses, including physics, yet time constraints often limit students' experiences. Instructors and teaching assistants spend considerable time explaining labs, leaving limited time for experimentation. This poster introduces a lab teaching intervention implemented in an introductory studio mechanics course for engineers at a large university. Instead of in-person lab introductions, the lab manual incorporates QR codes linking to TA-created videos, PhET simulations, and other resources. While data collection is ongoing, we hypothesize improved student engagement and understanding in comparison to traditional labs. Both intervention and control (traditional) sections' lab students will participate in pre- and post-lab surveys measuring engagement, perceived comprehension, interest, and self-efficacy during uniform circular motion (UCM) experiments. We anticipate that this intervention will enhance student performance by breaking down instruction into manageable, re-playable segments and integrating it into relevant sections of the lab manual. This has the potential to enhance introductory lab instruction, improve the student experience, and alleviate the instructional burden on TAs tasked with repetitive procedural explanations.