e-Lab: An electronic classroom for real-time distance delivery of a laboratory course

Journal of Engineering Education, Oct 2001 by Gurocak, Hakan

The e-Lab was also equipped with three student stations to be used by the local students (Figure 5). Each station contains a laptop computer and a touch monitor connected to it. Just like the remote students, the local ones are connected to the equipment over the network. C Equipment at remote classrooms

Equipment needed at each remote classroom consists of student stations with laptop computers and touch monitors. Each computer has RSLogix, RSView and a Web2D2 client installed. In addition, each computer has WWW browsers and FTP software.

IV. LABORATORY SESSIONS

The development of the course was a two-year project that started in July 1999. We developed five lab sessions and offered the course in Spring 2000 and 2001 semesters. In the first offering, there were 5 students at the Boeing classroom, 2 at WSU Pullman and 11 in the WSU Vancouver classroom. In the second offering, there were 10 students at WSU Pullman and 5 at WSU Vancouver classrooms. Students worked in teams in all laboratory sessions.

A Typical laboratory session

Since the WHETS classroom in Vancouver is used by all departments, the equipment for the e-Lab had to be brought into the classroom before each lab session and removed after the session. The e-Lab (Figure 5) is set up with the help of the local students in about 10-15 minutes. In the meantime, the WHETS operators establish audio/video connection to the remote sites, adjust camera angles and microphone volumes. Setting up before and cleaning up after the experiments at the remote sites are handled by the operator and students at those sites.

Students are grouped into teams of two or three at each site. The two and a half hour lab session starts with an overview of the lab activity. The instructor explains the details of the lab hardware by pointing at the hardware while the WHETS operator controls the camera angles and shots with multiple cameras to show the details to the remote students. It is interesting to note that the local students tend to watch the TV monitors in the classroom instead of the instructor since this gives them a much better view of the equipment. During this overview students ask a lot of questions. Details of software can also be shown to the students by connecting the instructor's computer to WHETS. Following the overview, an illustrative example is worked out with the entire class following and applying step-by-step directions from the instructor.

Students start working on the assignment offline. If a team finishes or wants to test an idea they ask for permission from the instructor to connect to the hardware. If their program requires more work, which is usually the case, they go offline and allow another team to try. This simple method of traffic management works exceptionally well. During these trial runs students ask a lot of questions and discuss their ideas with the instructor. Usually other teams participate in the discussions, too. Typically, each team takes about five minutes to test their program with the hardware. But they usually try many times during the lab before they can make it work The parallel nature of the labs due to offline programming and the interwoven online time with the hardware makes it easy to handle multiple teams working on two Festo MPS units. Except for the robot programming lab, where each team has to spend a longer time online, there is almost no time spent by any team waiting to get online with the hardware. In fact, occasionally the hardware was idle for short periods of time while the teams struggled to develop the programs. Table 1 summarizes the learning activities along with the hardware and software used in each lab. Except for lab 1, where hardware is mailed to the remote sites, all remaining labs are conducted by accessing hardware over the Internet.