Abstract:

Education is progressing continuously, and part of this progress is related with the technology advances. The global pandemic caused by COVID19 has accentuated this fact due to the impossibility of face-to-face learning, especially during the last year. Under these circumstances, the only alternative option was the remote and online learning, what causes the immediate update to new methodologies.

That was the case of the laboratory practices, which were hardly conceivable in a remote way before this global situation. In our particular case, we were forced to move the electronics laboratory from the classroom to the cloud, transforming the physical practices into virtual ones. To achieve this, we had to find the most effective and realistic way to carry it out.

Tinkercad, an online platform for creating circuits, was the tool selected for our purpose. It constitutes a reliable tool, with many possibilities and with a huge community of users sharing their projects. The use of this platform for laboratory subjects, both for basic and more advanced levels of electronics, has proven to be very suitable.

In our case, we have used the tool in the subject of Electronic Instrumentation, in the master’s degree in Telecommunications Engineering at the University of Alicante. The practices of this subject are focused on the acquisition of data, using Arduino as the basic microcontroller. In this sense, Tinkercad includes the Arduino microcontroller on the platform, as well as a large number of input and output elements for it, which makes it very appropriate for the development of practices compared to other alternatives that were also studied. Its use and its implementation by the students have provided very good results, with a wide range of possibilities, even higher than with the real components used at the laboratory. This has been confirmed by the students themselves through satisfaction surveys, even though it was a very complicated task, the replacement of the physical components of the laboratory, by a completely virtual environment. Subsequent research has confirmed that few similar applications or virtual environments have the possibilities and interactivity of this one.

The return to normality seems closer and closer, but this does not mean that we have to put aside the possibilities that Tinkercad offers us. On the contrary, we think that the almost more complicated task of including this tool within the face-to-face learning is necessary. We have to ensure that students have a very wide range of possibilities so that the creation, practice and development of their skills does not remain in the past. The inclusion of Tinkercad in the face-to-face learning, combined with the implementation with real components, provides additional possibilities to the learning process. Thus, the inclusion of Tinkercad in the classroom teaching is a matter of necessity for the improvement of these practices

Keywords:

Electronics laboratory, electronic instrumentation, Tinkercad, virtual laboratory.