Abstract:

This article has several objectives:
a) to make visible the existing problems in rural schools in accessing to practical activities in STEM disciplines;
b) to show the versatility and possibilities offered by remote laboratories in a diverse scenario such as rural education;
c) to open the doors of the R3 project to all interested teachers.

According to Rogeli Santamaría (Inspector of Education in the Generalitat de Valencia) and advisor to the R3 project, newly built schools with more than 9 units (3 EI + 6 EP) do not have dedicated spaces to carry out natural science or technology experiments. And in general, those that do have laboratories are old facilities, with few materials and little investment given the low pupil ratio.

However, rural (and urban) schools have really good access to the Internet, which makes it easier for them to access a large number of digital resources. Perhaps because of this need to be connected and this familiarity with digital tools, pupils in rural schools are more skilled in the use of these resources than urban pupils. In this respect, Esther del Moral (University of Oviedo) has several articles on rurality and ICT and shows that ICT have helped to improve training and interconnection among rural teachers and have modified their teaching methodology in a positive way.

In the work "Two centuries of rural schools", published in December 2020 in The Conversation (https://theconversation.com/dos-siglos-de-escuela-rural-151340), it is stated that "rural schools in Spain obtain good academic results, even better than in urban environments".

If we combine the lack of means to carry out practical experiences in the laboratory with the high capacity of access to online educational resources in rural schools, the question we could ask would be, is it possible to carry out experiments through the internet in the same way as if we were in a traditional laboratory? And the answer is clear: yes, thanks to remote labs.

A remote lab is neither a simulator nor a virtual lab where the response of the experiment is "pre-designed" or "pre-programmed". A remote lab offers real experiments mediated by the internet. That is, the set of technologies that we can integrate in a web browser are the hands, eyes and ears of the user, who can be thousands of kilometres away from the experiment, but controlling the experiment and getting the same results (and learning experience) as if he/she were physically in the lab.

The R3 project: Rural, Remote and Real (https://proyecto-r3.ingenieria.deusto.es/), funded by the Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology of the Ministry of Science and Innovation, aims to offer teachers and students in rural schools the possibility of carrying out scientific and technological experiments in the classroom without the need for any physical equipment in the school itself, thanks to the use of remote laboratories, which can be used with primary, secondary and high school students. The project trains teachers in the use of these laboratories so that it is then up to each teacher to create their own teaching materials to take back to the classroom.

The final version of the article will introduce some of the remote laboratories that have been most successful among teachers and students, some examples of materials created by participating teachers, as well as general information on the results of the R3 project, which is active and open to new teachers who want to join the R3 community.

Keywords:

Remote laboratories, rural schools, distance education, STEM.