Introduction to Signals
Describe a periodic signal using frequency, period and wavelength · convert between frequency and period · predict how wavelength responds to a frequency change.
Sixty students,
sixty oscilloscopes
Signal Verse AR is designed to sit alongside a signals and systems course, not replace it. It covers the part a lecture cannot: letting every student manipulate a live signal at the exact moment the concept is introduced.
67 min total
4 phases
21 questions
No lab booking
Syllabus
Four phases, mapped to outcomes
Each phase states its learning outcomes explicitly, so mapping onto your own module descriptor is a matter of matching wording rather than guessing intent.
Amplitude & Wave Behaviour
Relate amplitude to signal power · identify clipping in a waveform display · explain why gain staging matters in a real system.
Signal Recognition
Explain how spatial landmarks become a one-dimensional signal · read a feature vector plotted as a waveform · describe why normalisation precedes comparison.
Advanced Signal Analysis
Decompose a composite wave into harmonics · apply the Nyquist criterion to choose a sample rate · judge signal quality from a noisy trace.
Placement
Three ways departments have used it
Pre-lab, at home
Students arrive at the physical lab already knowing what a frequency change looks like. Bench time goes to measurement technique rather than first contact with the concept.
In the lecture, live
Ten minutes mid-lecture with the marker on the projector screen. Everyone scans the same image from their seat and follows the same experiment at once.
Remedial, self-paced
Assigned to students who struggled with the first assessment. The gated phases mean they cannot skip past the thing that was actually missing.
Logistics
What running it actually involves
The honest version, including the parts that are mildly annoying.
- Setup time
- One print job and an email to the cohort
- Devices
- Student-owned phones; roughly 4% of a class needs the non-AR path
- Markers
- One A4 sheet per student, or one projected image for a room
- Enrolment
- By institutional email domain — no per-student admin
- Assessment
- Exportable completion records; not a graded instrument on its own
- Cost
- Free for pilots through the 2026–27 academic year
Things that go wrong in a real classroom
Someone prints at 94%
The app measures the marker against the library and warns. Tell students to check one against a ruler before the session and this disappears.
Fluorescent tubes on glossy paper
The single most common cause of a marker not scanning. Matte paper solves it; tilting the sheet is the quick fix mid-session.
A student skips the motion permission
The workbench still runs but drifts when they move. It is worth naming this in the first two minutes rather than debugging it later.
Someone finishes in twenty minutes
The experiments have no upper bound. Point fast finishers at Phase 4's harmonic decomposition and ask them to explain it to the person next to them.
From the pilots
What we can and cannot claim
Six departments, 1,240 students, one academic year. That is a pilot, not a controlled study — so here is what the numbers do and do not support.
Supported by the data
- 94% of students who start Phase 1 pass it within two attempts.
- Median time to complete all four phases is 67 minutes.
- The Nyquist question in Phase 4 is the most-failed item, at 38% first-attempt error.
- Students who retry a quiz score a median 22 points higher on the second attempt.
Not yet demonstrated
- That it improves end-of-module exam marks. We have no control group and will not pretend otherwise.
- That retention persists beyond a semester. Nothing has been measured at that distance yet.
- That it works as well outside electronics. Adjacent subjects are on the roadmap, not in the data.
If you would like to run a properly controlled study, we will supply the tooling and the raw data and stay out of the analysis.
I used it for ten minutes in a Tuesday lecture. By Thursday three students had finished all four phases without being asked to, and one of them wanted to argue with me about the Nyquist question. That has never happened before.
AS
Prof. Amit Sharma
Electronics & Communication Engineering
Pilot it this semester
One class, no cost, no purchase order. Tell us what you teach and we will map the phases onto your module descriptor.