Olga Dziabenko

Time to play with a microcontroller managed mobile bot

Although science, engineering, and technology have an influence on humanitys present and future challenges, many students lack even a fundamental knowledge in these disciplines. Science teachers are looking for new teaching models and tools that provide skills for entering careers these fields. During the last two decades academia has recognized education games as a beneficial instrument for this purpose. This paper presents first steps in the design and development of the online education game, based on the remote experiments - a microcontroller managed mobile bot (ROBOT). A scenario, architecture, and design of the game will be described. The technological restrictions of the remote experiments will be discussed.

LXI technologies for remote labs: an extension of the VISIR project

Several remote labs to support analog circuits are presented in this work. They are analyzed from the software and the hardware point of view. VISIR remote lab is one of these labs. After this analysis, a new VISIR remote lab approach is presented. This extension of the VISIR project is based on LXI technologies with the aim of becoming it in a remote lab easily interchangeable with other instruments. The addition of new components and experiments is also easier and cheaper.

Addressing low cost remote laboratories through federation protocols: Fish tank remote laboratory

A remote laboratory is a software and hardware tool which enables students to use real equipment -located in an educational institution- through the Internet. This way, students can experiment as if they were using the laboratories with their own hands. There are usually two approaches when designing remote laboratories: relying on small, inexpensive devices that can be deployed anywhere or relying software rich software infrastructures that support high load of users, providing panel administration, access to other institutional servers (e.g. directories such as Lightweight Directory Access Protocol “LDAP”), etc. With distributed remote laboratory architectures, it is possible to have the laboratory server on the former approach, but the management usually relies on the latter. In certain entities, such as secondary schools or farm schools, they may not be willing to buy and maintain a dedicated server for remote laboratories, and therefore the former approach is more adequate. However, a tradeoff is being made between management capabilities and how easy is to deploy the system. This contribution shows how federation could help in solving this tradeoff, and it uses a real fish tank remote laboratory as a case study.

Remote experiments and online games: How to merge them?

Online games fulfill the basic requirements of learning environments and can provide engaging learning experience for students. The remote experimentations bring to STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) students the ability to practice configuration, deployment, and troubleshooting scenarios in real-life environment on real equipment. These two teaching methodologies are well known, developed and described in the literature. However, the concepts of integration of the remote experimentations and the game setting are yet to be developed. This paper discusses the guidelines for such integrations. The emphasis is made on the educational game design and the flow as a positive impact on learning and attitude of the players. Besides the challenges of balancing attractive elements (graphics, sounds) and educational objectives, the design of the games related to remote laboratories needs to be adjusted to contemporary technological conditions.

Training of microcontrollers using remote experiments

Nowadays lifelong education is a necessity for all professionals from electro-mechanical industry. Creating of industrial training that delivers up-to-date knowledge with user friendly educational methods requests a close cooperation of industry and educational institutions. This paper presents results of project E-Learning and Practical Training of Mechatronics and Alternative Technologies in Industrial Community (E-PRAGMATIC) for 7 European countries. The need analysis and developed training will be described. The three courses: (a) Introduction to Microcontroller, (b) 8-bit Microcontrollers Advanced Course, (c) Low-cost platform to provide LAN / WAN connectivity for embedded systems, developed by University of Deusto, will be provided in case study format.

Exploring students collaboration in remote laboratory infrastructures

Educational remote laboratories are a software and hardware tool that allows students to remotely access real equipment located in the university as if they were in a hands-on-lab session. Since the equipment used by students is real, it has associated costs: laboratory development, hardware used and maintenance costs. Given the remote nature of the remote laboratories, institutions can share these costs by sharing the access to the laboratories. In order to reduce the associated development and maintenance costs, as well as to reduce the overall costs by managing the sharing of laboratories in different institutions, software infrastructures and toolkits have arisen, such as the MIT iLab project, the Labshare Sahara project, or WebLab-Deusto. However, a particular feature seamlessly present on hands-on-lab sessions but not often present in remote laboratories sessions is direct collaboration among students. While collaboration at a particular laboratory level is generally supported -or can easily be implemented-, some features of remote laboratory management systems such as load balancing or federation might enter in conflict with collaboration. This paper is focused on discussing levels of adoption of collaboration in these remote laboratory management systems.

Classifying online laboratories: Reality, simulation, user perception and potential overlaps

Students of technological fields must practice so as to properly learn a particular field. There are different ways to practice: hands-on-lab in a real environment or a mockup, datasets (and tools for analyzing these datasets), or simulations. Each solution provides different advantages and disadvantages. For example, students might not prefer simulations since they do not always provide accurate real values (and when testing in a real laboratory results differ and the engagement might be higher), but they might be more affordable than real laboratories (depending on the field, there might not be any other affordable solution than a simulation). Datasets of recorded measurements are an equidistant point, where costs are lower and data is real, but no interaction is performed by the users with the reality. When creating remote laboratories, a system that enables students access the final equipment is usually used, but this might not be the best option. Sometimes, every potential input could be recorded and used in the future as a dataset to let users access this laboratory in a scalable way, and hybrid solutions could also be achieved. The focus of this contribution is to classify online laboratories from this perspective.

Towards a microRLMS approach for shared development of remote laboratories

Educational remote laboratories are a software and hardware tool that allows students to remotely access real equipment located in universities as if they were in a hands-on-lab session. They have been used for almost two decades. And most remote labs use at least a subset of the following features: authentication (verifying who is the user), authorization (granting permissions to laboatories), scheduling (usually a queue or a calendar), user tracking (registering students activities), federation or administrative tools. Systems that provided these features in a unified approach arose, called Remote Laboratory Management Systems (RLMSs). RLMS provide toolkits for making the development of remote labs easier: a remote lab developer uses one of these toolkits and all the features are automatically inherited. Furthermore, new versions of the same RLMS will provide new features. However, sometimes these RLMS do not allow remote lab developers to consume only certain features, implementing the rest themselves. This is a problem when integrating external laboratories, and increments the learning curve. The focus of this contribution is to describe a lighter approach based on multiple coupled small optional services called microRLMS.

An integrated solution for basics digital electronics: Boole-DEUSTO and WebLab-DEUSTO

The software BOOLE-DEUSTO is oriented to the design of digital electronic circuits from the student point of view. On the other hand, WebLab-DEUSTO is a well known remote laboratory, and one of the implemented experiments is focused on CPLD and digital electronics. The objective of this paper is to describe the results of connecting BOOLE-DEUSTO and WebLab-DEUSTO. Under this common approach, a novel student can design a digital circuit using K maps, truth tables, Boolean expressions, etc. and then, automatically, he/she can implement, download and see the real circuit in the remote lab.

Explorative learning with technology in STEM - The OLAREX experience

The secondary educational system should react adequate to fast technological changes in the last decade and incorporate them in an appropriate way in the learning and teaching process. The Y-generation is following these technological tendencies very fast and often uncritical. But they are good in all kind of applications of modern ICT trends. At the same time the average knowledge level in STEM subjects is in a lot of European schools inadequate to this development. One of the reasons is the higher level of abstraction needed to understand this kind of knowledge. Practical experience on real experiments can really support the learning process in this area. But a lot of secondary schools have neither the technical basis nor the access to equipped laboratories. Online labs open up opportunities for rather new teaching methods that gain an important role in educational trends. This applies to secondary school education, higher education, and industrial training. The term of online labs refers to interactive experiments that can be provided over the Internet. These labs can be divided into two groups: virtual laboratories and remote laboratories. Virtual labs are based on software simulations and often used in the field of mathematics and in particular simulations where the practical implementation is too difficult or even impossible to realize due to security reasons. In comparison to virtual labs, remote labs have real hardware and allow users to manipulate it. As laboratory equipment and instruments are becoming increasingly sophisticated and too expensive for universities to purchase or maintain, remote laboratories are a viable option. Within the scope of the OLAREX project teachers from secondary schools were invited to learn more about online labs, their functionalities and usage, and their applicability in the classroom. This paper will look at both, the experience of developers of online labs and the experience of teachers using online labs.