REMOTE INTERACTIVE EXPERIMENTS USING LABVIEW FOR ELECTRONIC TEST BENCH

Currently, european universities are immersed in processes intended to ensure high quality training, in order to comply with the standards and guidelines of the European Higher Education Area (EHEA). One of the most promising innovations designed to improve both teaching and learning is to apply modern information and communication technologies (ICT) to develop education programmes. For this purpose, it is necessary a continuous insight and innovation in developing new technology-based methodologies and management of teaching and learning, known under the term e-learning.

There is great interest worldwide in e-learning, being one clear proof of it the large number of recently established online learning platforms, known as Learning Management Systems, such as WebCT, Fronter, LRN, Ilias, Blackboard, eCollege and Moodle, to name a few. These applications have proved to be very efficient for the distribution of educational materials, promoting collaborative learning and allowing teachers to track and manage training activities.

However, education in Science and Engineering requires a combination of theoretical knowledge and practical experience. The current trend in Technical Schools toward a greater use of ICTs as learning support has the challenge of the development of practical experiments for students over the Internet. This gives students access to the lab from anywhere at any time, thus reducing costs substantially.

In this sense, the present work is aimed at designing and implementing a virtual laboratory, which allows students to remotely control the electronic instrumentation equipment of a real lab via the Internet. The purpose of this application is to facilitate the practical activities related to electronic circuits, allowing students to manipulate instrumentation equipment and learning of measurement procedures.

For developing this virtual laboratory we decided to use LabView. This is a graphical programming environment distributed by National Instruments, which provides high-level network capabilities. This software platform has provided us with the ability to perform remote handling of equipment in a highly interactive manner, but with enough simplicity as needed for educational purposes.

This work makes use of distributed computing tools of LabView, in particular, a method for calling subroutines referred to as "call-by-reference”. Using this method, we can make reference to a subroutine on a local machine or through a remote computer via TCP/IP transparently. This facilitates the use of the application for this purpose.

Finally, the use of LabView by students represents an interesting opportunity for application in research or industry.