Remote Experimentation in a Collaborative Virtual Environment

In engineering education, concepts taught through lectures are often complemented by laboratory experimentation. Students can observe dynamic phenomena that are often difficult to explain by written material. Furthermore, interactive experimentation on real world plants improves the motivation of the students and also develops an engineering approach to solve realistic problems. This contribution presents a collaborative virtual environment for a remote laboratory. Students have access to the remote laboratory via Internet from anywhere at any time. They control the experiments exclusively with their standard Web browser, no additional software is needed. The collaborative environment allows the experimentation in a team. The group is able to interact and to discuss the results of their work. A real collaboration like in local experimentation is possible. The remote laboratory is based on a client/server architecture, which is mainly implemented in the Java programming language. The methods and software modules developed for the laboratory are generic and are frequently used in several remote experiments at some German universities. Furthermore the contribution discusses the motivation of remote experimentation.

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