Showing papers by "Pablo Orduna published in 2017"

Empirical Analysis of the Use of the VISIR Remote Lab in Teaching Analog Electronics

Abstract: Remote laboratories give students the opportunity of experimenting in STEM by using the Internet to control and measure an experimental setting. Remote laboratories are increasingly used in the classroom to complement, or substitute for, hands-on laboratories, so it is important to know its learning value. While many authors approach this question through qualitative analyses, this paper reports a replicated quantitative study that evaluates the teaching performance of one of these resources, the virtual instrument systems in reality (VISIR) remote laboratory. VISIR, described here, is the most popular remote laboratory for basic analog electronics. This paper hypothesizes that use of a remote laboratory has a positive effect on students’ learning process. This report analyzes the effect of the use of VISIR in five different groups of students from two different academic years (2013–2014 and 2014–2015), with three teachers and at two educational levels. The empirical experience focuses on Ohm’s Law. The results obtained are reported using a pretest and post-test design. The tests were carefully designed and analyzed, and their reliability and validity were assessed. The analysis of knowledge test question results shows that the post-test scores are higher that the pretest. The difference is significant according to Wilcoxon test ( ${p} ), and produces a Cohen effect size of 1.0. The VISIR remote laboratory’s positive effect on students’ learning processes indicates that remote laboratories can produce a positive effect in students’ learning if an appropriate activity is used.

Towards New Multiplatform Hybrid Online Laboratory Models

Abstract: Online laboratories have traditionally been split between virtual labs, with simulated components; and remote labs, with real components. The former tend to provide less realism but to be easily scalable and less expensive to maintain, while the latter are fully real but tend to require a higher maintenance effort and be more error-prone. This technical paper describes an architecture for hybrid labs merging the two approaches, in which virtual and real components interact with each other. The goal is to leverage the advantages of each type of lab. The architecture is fully web-based and multiplatform, which is in line with the industry and the remote laboratory community trends. Only recently has this become technically feasible for graphic-intensive laboratories due to previous limitations in browser-based graphical technologies. This architecture relies on the recent HTML5 and WebGL standards to overcome these limitations, and makes use of the Unity technology. To ensure that the proposed architecture is suitable, we set requirements based on the literature, we compare it with other approaches, and we examine its scope, strengths, and weaknesses. Additionally, we illustrate it with a concrete hybrid lab and we evaluate its benefits and potential through educational experiments.

An Open and Scalable Web-Based Interactive Live-Streaming architecture: The WILSP Platform

Abstract: Interactive live-streaming applications and platforms face particular challenges: the actions of the viewer’s affect the content of the stream A minimal capture-render delay is critical This is the case of applications, such as remote laboratories, which allow students to view specific hardware through a webcam, and interact with it remotely in close to real time It is also the case of other applications, such as videoconferencing or remote rendering In the latest years, several commercial live-streaming platforms have appeared However, the most of them have two significant limitations First, because they are oriented toward standard live-streaming, their capture-render delay tends to be too high for interactive live-streaming Second, their architectures and sources are closed That makes them unsuitable for many research and practical purposes, especially when customization is required This paper presents the requirements for an interactive live-streaming platform, focusing on remote lab needs as a case study Then, it proposes an architecture to satisfy those requirements that relies on Redis to achieve high scalability The architecture is based on open technologies, and has been implemented and published as open source From a client-side perspective, it is web-based and mobile-friendly It is intended to be useful for both research and practical purposes Finally, this paper experimentally evaluates the proposed architecture through its contributed implementation, analyzing its performance and scalability

RoboBlock: A remote lab for robotics and visual programming

Abstract: Robotics is part of K12 curricula in different subjects and countries because it is exciting and formative. To teach, the teacher and the school need a laboratory with robots, and this is a challenge because they are not cheap and they need to be maintained. In this scenario the use of a remote lab for robotics is a good solution. There are several remote labs for robotics, the main advantage of RoboBlock is that it offers in the same interface the robot and a visual tool based on Blockly to program the robot.