Smartphone Apps for Teaching Engineering Courses: Experience and Scope

Abstract

Smartphone apps have lately emerged as a potent instructional aid for teaching engineering courses. Teaching engineering courses often involve explaining complex problems that require creative solutions to students who are typically tech-savvy. This article reviews 10 smartphone apps that have been developed to teach engineering courses. The apps have been used to teach a wide range of engineering courses at undergraduate and graduate levels in classroom and laboratory environments. The apps help students to solve engineering problems by means of simulation and experimentation. They use techniques varying from algorithm visualization to augmented reality to enrich the courses. This article also provides suggestions on how to develop and use smartphone apps for teaching engineering courses. It is recommended that the developers of such apps pay special attention to their content, user interface, dissemination, and integration with the curriculum to get the best result.