ITR: An Infrastructure for Designing and Conducting Remote Laboratories

EIA 0326309 Sven Esche Institution: Stevens Institute of Technology Title: An Infrastructure for Designing and Conducting Remote Laboratories This ITR medium award provides support for integrating a variety of resources for remote laboratories so that users can run experiments involving multiple devices in different labs in different locations. Users can perform collaborative experiments with multiple participants or combine experiments and simulations in an integrated lab experience. While developing an interface to support both physical and simulated laboratory activities various cognitive and instructional design issues are explored. As part of the research, the investigators will create alternative interfaces and evaluate them for pedagogical efficacy.

The intellectual merit of this project lies with the extensive prior research on which the project is based. Developing remote laboratories and including them in the curriculum as well as ascertaining their pedagogical efficacy are important pursuits for science, technology and engineering education. The project includes staff and students from multiple institutions thus giving it access to many vantage points for the research. The project is co-funded by the Engineering and Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorates. It is an extension of prior work that is to be tested extensively in engineering classrooms and is complaint with the ABET accreditation standards.

For broader impact, the education and research communities will be able to share laboratory facilities, enabling wider and faster access to laboratories than at the present time. This in itself could have a large positive impact on engineering and science education. The project involves significant percentages of ethnic minority and female students and has the potential to lead to the widespread adoption of remote laboratories as a means for improving student learning of difficult engineering concepts. Furthermore, the technology challenges of creating a framework for remote laboratories are simpler than, but analogous to other scientific and industrial problems. Success in this particular domain may suggest techniques that can be applied for sharing other sensor and actuator networks in a wide range of applications.