Remote laboratory for microcontroller programming course

this paper describes experience of changing microcontroller related course from face-to-face to remote format, which took place in Riga Technical University during the COVID- 19 pandemic during years 2020 and 2021. The name of the subject is Laboratory exercises in electronics. The primary ideology of that course is to let students touch and feel electronics without using any virtual stuff like simulators. Therefore, replacing everything with simulation is not a solution to such kind of course. In this publication, we want to describe system that is mixture of real physical system installed in the laboratory and remote interface interacting with the physical system.

Learning Science at University in Times of COVID-19 Crises from the Perspective of Lecturers—An Interview Study

The COVID-19 pandemic changed higher education radically and challenged faculties to adapt their teaching to the new circumstances. The aim of this study is to highlight changes, in particular, the advantages and disadvantages associated with them, and to find out what conclusions were drawn for the future in the three experimental natural sciences of biology, chemistry, and physics at the University of Konstanz (Germany). In a guided interview, the majority of the university teachers in the bachelor's programs were interviewed, and their statements were subsequently categorized. While lectures and tutorials in distance learning were held asynchronously or synchronously online, laboratory courses used a variety of formats. The number of disadvantages cited, as well as the number of university faculty citing the same disadvantage, is greater than for advantages. The most commonly cited drawbacks fall into the areas of workload, communication, feedback, and active student participation. Physical presence and a return to the original learning objectives in the lab courses is wanted by the majority. The results point to commonalities between the science subjects and should encourage science departments to work together on similar problems in similar formats in the future. Furthermore, there is an urgent and ongoing need for the training of natural science teachers in competence-oriented digital teaching. © 2023 by the authors.

Generic Laboratory Authoring Tool for Virtual and Remote Controlled Laboratories

Due to the impact of Covid-19, many students all over the world have faced some educational issues. Therefore, many educational institutes focused on shifting their learning process to E-learning system. To provide a complete E-learning system, the performing of virtual and remote Laboratory experiments is needed. In this paper, a generic and flexible online authoring tool for the Laboratory Learning System (LLS) is presented. The LLS system is a platform that provides teachers and students with a flexible environment for virtual and remote controlled labs using the proposed authoring tool. The heart of the LLS system is the authoring tool which facilities the ease and flexibility of designing various laboratory experiments which includes a number of pages, and each page has a number of steps with many draggable components. Furthermore, the proposed authoring tool is the first authoring tool that provides general and reusable virtual laboratory resource (VLR) for automatically managing laboratory software and hardware resources. To support the new VRL feature of the authoring tool, the LLS supports the ability to remotely control the laboratory equipment while performing laboratory experiments and also has the capability to run any type of simulation tool for virtually simulated labs. The proposed authoring tool is designed considering all the needed components with well-defined interfaces to achieve an effective and flexible Laboratory learning system. © 2022 IEEE.

Embedded Student Board for Digitalization of Engineering Education

Hands-on practice laboratory experience is an essential component for effective engineering education. Thanks to the recent technological advancement, remote and virtual laboratories are becoming more and more popular. The study presented in the current paper is focused on developing a student board that can be used by both teachers and students in the education process. For this board, several PSoC™ 6 applications have been developed, to provide students hands-on experience with various electronic basic concepts, which they can later practice by developing their own applications. Although many applications can be demonstrated using this board, in this paper the design and development of two practical applications is presented - LabVIEW Control of RGB Led Intensity and Signal Generation and Acquisition with LabVIEW Display. Those two applications are both using the PSoC 6 microcontroller and were prototyped on the NI ELVIS II device. The developed board has the main advantage of being an inexpensive mixed signal platform to teach important concepts in electronics embedded system laboratories, and it will suit well the educational needs of the post-COVID era. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Perception of Collaborative Student-Led Tutorials with Laboratory Experiments in e-Learning

In university teaching of fluid mechanics, student-led tutorials are often offered in addition to lectures, exercises, and laboratory experiments. In these, students learn collaboratively in small groups by working together on problems and tutors provide assistance. Due to the Corona pandemic, it was necessary to switch to an online format. Students rated the tutorials very highly and slightly better online than on-site. Conducting real and virtual experiments was rated relatively slightly better in the on-site format. A faculty-wide survey comparing different online tutorial formats shows a clear dependence on available hardware. With optimal equipment, collaborative online formats are rated as well as on-site. Perception and implementation thus also clearly depend on the hardware equipment, but more clearly on the educational setting. Students like student tutors best in online formats with the ability to ask live questions. The tutors coped very well with the requirements. Thus, after some initial additional effort due to the technical challenge, an effective replacement for the presence tutorials could be created, which were evaluated as a good starting point. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Online teaching of practical classes under the Covid-19 restrictions.

COVID -19 pandemic and its restrictions bring new challenges to all aspects and phases of higher education. At universities, new remote formats have been developed and deployed for lectures and laboratory exercises. This article addresses challenges and introduces the new experience with lectures and laboratory classes during the pandemic time at the Department of Measurement of the Czech Technical University in Prague, Faculty of Electrical Engineering. Based on the student survey of more than 250 students describes the possibilities of how to adapt the lectures during the lockdown. The article also introduces the Home Lab, a tool developed in the department that helps in distance teaching practical electronic classes. Home Lab includes two parts with functional groups, a Laboratory Experimental Device and a System of Measurement Instruments. The article also shows the opportunity for suitable remote exercises and variants of circuits that can be easily assembled and measured using Software Defined Instrument based on various microcontrollers. A detailed description of all Software Defined Instruments is also present. During the Pandemic, the home lab model was successfully practically verified during distance learning in three subjects, with more than 150 students per semester. It has also been shown that the Home Lab can be successfully deployed for a semester project. The article also presents experience with the teaching software-oriented courses. At the end of the article, practical knowledge and an experience from distance teaching during a three-semester lockdown are shared.

Remote laboratory for microcontroller programming course

this paper describes experience of changing microcontroller related course from face-to-face to remote format, which took place in Riga Technical University during the COVID-19 pandemic during years 2020 and 2021. The name of the subject is Laboratory exercises in electronics. The primary ideology of that course is to let students touch and feel electronics without using any virtual stuff like simulators. Therefore, replacing everything with simulation is not a solution to such kind of course. In this publication, we want to describe system that is mixture of real physical system installed in the laboratory and remote interface interacting with the physical system. © 2022 IEEE.

Remote Laboratory for Learning on Automation of Systems and Control Process with Easy Access and Low-Cost

The Covid-19 pandemic has affected many public and private institutions including universities which have suspended on-campus activities. This situation has encouraged universities to digitalize their laboratories practices since they are essential for students to complement theoretical knowledge. This paper describes the implementation of a remote laboratory for learning automation systems and operational process control from anywhere in the world. It is based on a client-server architecture and includes a module, a computer server, and a camera. This laboratory allows students to control and supervise the process of transport, selection, handling, and storage of metal and plastic objects. It is implemented with different security systems to avoid malfunctions. Also, it has an electrical and mechanical protection independent of the control system of the students to avoid damages to its moving components. This remote laboratory was developed at the Pedro Paulet Institute for Astronomical and Aerospace Research (IAAPP) to be used in the Control & Instrumentation Laboratory of the National University of San Augustin of Arequipa (UNSA). © 2022 IEEE.

CINEBOT: MORE THAN JUST A ROBOT, A LABORATORY

This work reports the design, construction and deployment of a mechatronic system, which, combined with a computer vision module, provides students and teachers with a tool to experience with concepts of kinematics of a particle throughout the usage of a robot, known as to Cinebot, which can be controlled from any smart device endowed with a stable internet connection. The methodology used for envisioning and developing the system was engineering design. The figure of merits of the prototype was evaluated under a linear motion scheme with constant speed (~0.10 m/s), showing errors between 0.08 and 3.2%. © GKA Ediciones, authors.

RHL-Butterfly: A Scalable IoT-Based Breadboard Prototype for Embedded Systems Laboratories

This Research to Practice Work-In-Progress paper presents a virtualized breadboard solution for FPGAs and ARM microcontrollers in remote laboratories. The circumstances that rose amidst the COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated the vulnerability of current engineering education practices, particularly in dealing with hardware resources. Pivoting to the emergency online instruction presented challenges to the traditional practices in delivering hands-on engineering labs, which necessitated a solution that handles hardware prototyping without compromising creativity and instruction. One vital aspect of the embedded systems learning experience is ensuring students and faculty members alike have opportunities to learn and build custom prototyping circuits that interact with microprocessors on breadboards. In this paper, we build on the prior work that our group implemented on using virtualization to interface a virtual breadboard with physical hardware through web applications. Our previous work was limited to interfacing with one particular kind of hardware, designed to explore the capabilities of fundamental transducers and actuators that interface with hardware I/O pins. In hardware engineering practice, however, designers are not constrained by a single microprocessor selection to control their system and designs and are not limited by the type of transducers and actuators that provide the external circuit functionality. This paper presents a solution by scaling the existing virtual breadboard research to support FPGAs and ARM microcontrollers and intermediate logic gate integrated circuits for practical use in engineering curriculums. Providing this increased selection of supporting hardware helps facilitate student learning and simulates hardware development in an industrial setting. Due to the rising popularity of FPGAs and ARM microcontrollers in industry and in education, we expect that our solution will serve a larger audience through this broader selection of supported hardware. Our solution virtualizes the breadboard prototyping experience without sacrificing the nature of real-time embedded systems by taking the user prototyped inputs and outputs and directly programming the functionality of the surrounding system to physical hardware. This balance between a virtualized interface and physical hardware implementation preserves a hardware curriculum embedded systems engineering education and brings a promising solution to expand the scalability and accessibility of engineering labs. © 2022 IEEE.

Student Perspectives on Remote Hardware Labs and Equitable Access in a Post-Pandemic Era

This Research Full Paper builds on a prior study that compared overall student performance between in-hand versus remotely accessible hardware in digital design courses. The COVID-19 pandemic necessitated a global educational shift to emergency online learning that led to rethinking the delivery of engineering labs. The prior study showed that, amidst pandemic-necessitated online learning, student understanding was not impeded by the incorporation of remotely accessible hardware into the course curriculum;rather, using remote hardware resulted in similar or better learning outcomes. In this paper, we analyze the remotely accessible hardware lab through the lens of equity, investigating the student perspective on equitable access and the remote lab experience. The study accomplishes this goal by surveying students of a junior-level digital design course who use a remotely accessible hardware lab for completing their assignments. The survey aims to determine the factors deemed important by today's learners - those who have experienced remote learning for approximately two years of their educational careers - when considering equitable access and remote labs. Survey questions utilized the multiple-choice, semantic differential scale, and Likert scale formats for quantitative analysis as well as inductive coding of freeform responses for qualitative analysis. Initial findings from the survey are the key considerations of the surveyed students which include Factors of the Remote Experience (FREs) and Factors of Equitable Access (FEAs). FREs and FEAs specifically relate to the Student's Access to Electronic Devices, the Student's Environment Outside of Class, the Student's Schedule, the Student's Internet Quality, the lab's Learnability, the lab's Web Interface Design, the lab's Convenience, the lab's Overall Positive Experience, the lab's Ease of Use, the lab's Internet Quality, and the lab's Affordability. Rooted in the online learner's experience, these results contribute to an improved understanding of how students perceive equitable access to engineering education which shall guide better-informed advancements in the field in a post-pandemic world. © 2022 IEEE.

Surviving the Unforeseen - Teaching IT and Engineering Students During COVID-19 Outbreak

In this Full Paper on Innovative Practise, we sum up our teaching experience during the COVID-19 pandemic. We focus on several courses taught at the Department of Computer Systems. The main technique to cope with COVID-19 restrictions in higher education is to use online teaching solutions. The first step was to make the traditional lectures available online through recordings enabling students to attend lectures as needed. Yet, for several courses, a quick reconfiguration was required for laboratory exercises as COVID restrictions were established in the middle of the study semester. Thereby, an irreplaceable solution was to use remote laboratories. One of the main concerns was how to set up the online environment within days and weeks and not in months. In addition to remote laboratories, we propose an online teaching and custom assessment setup that to the best of our knowledge has not been used before. For example, instead of using Proctorio for online assessment, we propose a two-stage, licence-free, online examination setup. The proof of concept was carried out with more than 200 students. © 2022 IEEE.

Rectification Laboratory - from in-lab to remote - the development story

Using remote laboratories in STEM education to provide students with practical learning content has gained importance in recent years, in particular since Covid19. However, the application of remote labs plays a minor role in the education of chemists. With this paper we want to give a detailed insight view on the development process of a remote lab for chemists, reasons for such a development as well as how we would approach it with today's knowledge. As educators in the STEM field at university level, we underestimated the impact of the technical setup on the learning outcomes and would like to encourage other educators to take a closer look on the didactic implementation prior starting such a process. However, the use of remote labs can be a wonderful addition to STEM education and can help to prepare students for the working life in times of Industry 4.0. © 2022 IEEE.

The Need for E-Learning Standards for Online Laboratory Management Systems

E-Learning education, Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs) and Small Private Online Courses (SPOCs) have been ex-panding in the last decade. However, it increased in giant strides during the COVID-19 pandemic when the schools and universities did not have another option than to use remote education. Having a general understanding of E-Learning technology is not enough to implement an engineering virtual classrooms and laboratories. E-Learning standards are needed in all areas of E-Learning Systems such as online educational web applications, Learning Management Systems, and online labs, among others to gain interoperability, scalability, sustainability, security, privacy, and safety. The main objective of this paper is to discuss in general the current standards and technologies applied to E-Learning systems and analyze the need for a specific standards for Online Laboratory Management Systems (OLMS). © 2022 IEEE.

Teaching Engineering Students Practical Skills By Means of Remote Laboratories

Remote teaching in engineering study courses has become more and more necessary since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Many classes have to be given online, and while more theoretical subjects can more or less easily be adapted to a pure online version, especially engineering courses are hard to replace by virtual classrooms. As most engineering students will at some time be employed in industry, only teaching virtual courses lacks building up a gut feeling for the technical devices and thus leads to required additional training and diminished value of the education. This paper gives an overview on protocols and systems for remote laboratories as well as a presentation of an example experimental setup, namely a hardware model of a sophisticated elevator having two cabins in one shaft. © 2022 IEEE.

Using Arduino Kits and Discord to Implement A Fully Remote Laboratory Course During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Laboratory courses were forced to switch to online format during the COVID-19 pandemic, with students losing access to laboratory equipment in on-campus facilities. This paper reports on adapting a senior-level Control and Vibration Laboratory curriculum to enable students to complete exercises remotely, using the Arduino platform and its accessories. The results show that the remote-learning format is a viable and sometimes preferable learning solution based on students' positive feedback. The paper also identified several other online tools and platforms, including Discord and Tinkercad, that contributed to the overall learning experience. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2022.

Work in Progress: Remote Laboratory Delivery with an At-Home Biomechanical Kinematic Data Acquisition Method

Under the remote learning mode due to COVID-19, educational laboratory modules lacking the active data acquisition step tend to lose students' engagement and diminish their eagerness to explore further knowledge. Such shortcomings are more profound in practical fields of study, such as Biomechanics. The goal of this paper is to present a remote laboratory delivery and evaluation method where students can apply principles of kinematic and kinetic biomechanical analysis on their own body motions with a computer vision algorithm to interactively solve a motion analysis problem. In this preliminary study, students were given the freedom to choose a specific body motion to be captured and analyzed, such as elbow, knee, wrist, and neck joint movements. Motion specifications included determination of the motion type, and also the starting and ending angular or linear positions. Readily available labels were utilized as passive joint markers. Students were then instructed to video record their joint motions using their laptop cameras. A custom video tracking algorithm specifically designed to track spatial locations was then employed to capture relative positions of the recorded motions. Laboratory instructions asked the students to perform kinematic calculations on the algorithm's generated positional data to determine joint velocities and accelerations, and then perform kinetic analyses to estimate the associated muscle forces. Laboratory requirements were concluded with a reflection prompt to evaluate the activity's workload and effort perceived by the students. These activities were delivered twice in two different academic terms. Samples of the produced kinematic data using our methods were verified in comparison with a standard physical motion capture system, where similar joint motion descriptive results were observed. Results show that the completion rate of laboratory requirements was 97% in the first term of delivery, and 100% in the second term, as supported by the full technical reports submissions that included critical data analysis and reflections of the laboratory experience. Student reflections were very positive and expressed how the lab activity was interesting as it kept a high level of engagement and provided a way to make connections between practice and theory. In conclusion, the proposed approach may improve the students' laboratory experience in learning biomechanics through a motion analysis scenario, and allow them to remotely be fully engaged, active, and passionate learners. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2022.

Remote Laboratory-Based Learning in A Thermal Fluid Course

Most educators look for experiential learning elements to engage students through interactive concept practice, thus leading their students to reach improved levels of comprehension. The COVID-19 pandemic created a unique challenge for instructors forcing them to adjust their laboratory-based courses and to adapt to a new remote educational medium involving experiential learning. Many innovative ways came to light and were implemented by educators to overcome this challenge. This includes simulations, recorded experiments, and live experiments run by the instructor and watched by students remotely, to name a few. Along the same line of efforts to alleviate challenges to experiential learning imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic, a remotely accessible experimental system was developed, tested, and employed to provide students an interactive and live hands-on learning experience. A heat exchanger system was built and tested with active involvement from students. The system was tested for remote access through an interactive computer interface to run an experiment and obtain measurements of various in-process parameters of the heat exchanger using a data acquisition system. After completion of the testing phase, the system was integrated over two academic terms in a thermal fluid laboratory course. Indirect and direct assessment of students' comprehension and engagement as they used the remote laboratory activity was carried out to evaluate the experiential learning experience for the students. The student feedback regarding remotely operating the heat exchanger system was mostly positive and the direct assessment data shows that the learning experience for students was not impeded during the pandemic due to the utilization of the new device. The system will continue to be implemented face-to-face with option of remote access available in future course offerings. Such a remote laboratory experience has shown great potential to complement and even enhance experiential learning experience of students in a laboratory course. Future plans include building and integrating more similar experimental devices and setups to enhance our preparedness for the unknown. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2022.

Remote Laboratory Platform for Microcontroller Practices

We present a low-cost Remote Laboratory platform developed to support the practices of the Vehicle Electronics course during the COVID-19 pandemic. The platform, which emerged as an emergency solution, has become a significant teaching resource. Although the platform was designed primarily for microcontroller (or FPGA) based practices, it could be extended to Analogue Electronics practices. From a hardware perspective, low-cost devices such as a Raspberry Pi, a camera or a old PC box have been used, while the software interface has been developed using Node-RED. © 2022 IEEE.

Design and Implementation of a Remote Lab for Investigation of DC Motors

The last two years and the COVID-19 situation showed the need to ensure sustainable engineering education via the use of virtual and remote laboratories. The aim of the article is to design a laboratory model for studying the characteristics of DC electric motors. The implementation is based on different well know solutions, such as Raspberry PI, ESP32, power modules and sensor. The communication is based on the TCP/IP protocol and the control of the power modules is implemented using PWM. The IoT implementation of the lab is based on the Home Assistant platform, which allows monitoring and control of remote devices. The study also presents the schematic diagram of the virtual laboratory system, which allows to explain and substantiate the role and behavior of each component. © 2022 IEEE.