2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Labs play a critical role in science and engineering education, offering practical insights and hands-on experience to students that can't be achieved through theoretical learning alone. With the continuous advancement in technology, education is being reshaped and many universities are now offering online programs. This shift in educational paradigm offers students access to a wider range of academic resources, without being limited by geographical boundaries, time constraints, among others. However, the rise of online education also brings unique challenges, such as lack of face-to-face interaction and limited hands-on learning experiences. Virtual labs, which allow students to conduct experiments in a computer-simulated environment, can provide a viable and effective solution for online courses that require hands-on labs.

Virtual Labs offer numerous advantages that can complement, and in some cases even replace, traditional in-person labs. Many educational institutions, including secondary schools and higher education institutions, face challenges in terms of establishing and maintaining traditional labs, such as high costs, space constraints, limited accessibility, among others. Virtual Labs, on the other hand, can simulate many of the experiences of a physical lab, allowing students to conduct experiments, gather data, and analyze results in a virtual environment. Virtual labs can be assessed from anywhere at any time. They can be used as pre-labs that can great shorten the time needed for the real physical lab or as post-labs if the student cannot complete the physical lab in the allotted time. Consequence of mistakes can be safely demonstrated in the virtual lab without exposing the student to real danger. Virtual labs can be especially useful for underrepresented groups that often don’t have sufficient educational resources.

This paper explores a wide range of issues in the rapid development of immersive virtual labs for engineering education, including different types of representations of the virtual environment, instrument and circuit simulation, user interface design, and integration of third-party libraries. Simulations of virtual environments often necessitate various types of representations, such as graphics models, physical models, and functional models, to optimize performance, fidelity, computational cost, and reusability. Utilization of multiple representations allows rapid development of virtual labs. For instance, the functional model of one oscilloscope can be easily adapted for another oscilloscope designed by a different manufacturer with minor modifications as oscilloscopes have similar functionalities while their visual appearance can vary. Advanced software development techniques such as object-oriented design and delegates are utilized to tackle the challenges in complex instrument and circuit simulation, such as the representation of continuous signals and discrete (digital) signals using the sampling theorem. This project makes use of the state-of-the-art design principles and techniques to create a user interface and virtual environment that are user friendly, efficient, and effective for learning. Integration of existing third-party software libraries is another crucial component in the rapid development of virtual labs. This project successfully integrated SPICE, a popular circuit simulator, as the backend of the virtual lab, greatly expediting the overall development. This paper will discuss the techniques for integration of third-party software to achieve interoperability between different software.

While our current development focuses on the virtual labs for the course XXX offered at XXX University, the proposed development techniques can be readily extended to other courses that utilize these common instruments, including courses offered by universities and high schools. A preliminary user study conducted with the first lab module in the course XXX demonstrated the effectiveness of the virtual lab.