2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Laboratory education plays a vital role in the education of engineers. Beyond concepts and principles, laboratories help students develop essential engineering skills such as problem-solving, designing, and troubleshooting. However, the use of laboratories in engineering education may be limited by a series of factors, including the cost of equipment, time, and infrastructure, among others. To reduce the consequences of such limitations, educators are constantly looking for emerging technologies that make the lab more inclusive, creative, and effective. Among these technologies, virtual laboratories are becoming very popular in engineering education.

The literature mentions several advantages of virtual labs compared to traditional hands-on labs. First, virtual labs usually require lower investment and fewer resources. Second, virtual labs can be accessed remotely. Third, virtual labs foster students’ learning of concepts and principles through simulations and representations of abstract phenomena. Finally, virtual labs are usually flexible and allow students to change the values of the different variables and explore the experimental results faster than hands-on or remote experimentation. A common critique regarding the use of virtual labs refers to the use of idealized data that usually do not reflect the uncertainties and nuances of the real world. Also, these labs generally lack the sense of reality necessary to immerse students in more authentic experiences.

Furthermore, many virtual labs focus on developing students’ conceptual understanding of a particular phenomenon or theory. In most cases, characteristics associated with the equipment, the setup, the environment, and all the experimental procedures are neglected. This approach is appropriated in most science-based courses and usually results in equivalent learning gains compared to traditional hands-on labs. However, the development of essential skills associated with labs in engineering education might be hindered by such an approach. Among these skills, one might cite communication and collaboration, safety, designing of experiments, and learning from failure.

This paper presents a conceptual and practical framework for the development of virtual labs for engineering education. The framework combines a classical backward design approach with the concepts of virtual equipment and digital twins to create virtual versions of different hands-on experiments. In these virtual experiments, students can reproduce all the hands-on practices virtually and learn not only concepts but also procedures and attitudes towards experimentation. The authors will discuss the theoretical foundations of the framework and present examples of virtual labs already developed for mechanical, electrical, civil, and chemical engineering education. In addition, the authors will present significant findings from the research on the use of virtual labs in engineering education and discuss the main concerns and difficulties in developing a virtual labs web platform used by more than 500,000 students.