Abstract:

Remote-controlled experiments have become an integral part of the everyday life of modern scientists. Among other things, automation offers the possibility of reducing effort, more precise data collection or averting danger for the experimenter. Performing such an experiment is a different experience than standing right next to your set-up. We consider it our duty to teach this experience to our students, too. For this we developed two fully remote-controlled experiments which will be used in the winter semester 2022/23 in our "Experimental optics course", which teaches hands-on laboratory experience.

This digital transformation of classical laboratory and practical training towards fully remote-controlled laboratories offers a wide range of advantages in future photonics teaching. As a key benefit, study programs and courses can potentially be shared between institutions around the world or made available to external students.

In the context of the international "M.Sc. Photonics" degree course at the Friedrich Schiller University Jena (FSU), the two cooperating projects digiPHOTON and Lichtwerkstatt Jena strive to accomplish this. digiPHOTON is a project funded by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), in which we have taken on the task of making the content of this master’s degree course accessible to online students. The Lichtwerkstatt Jena is a BMBF-funded project with the goal of building up and establishing an open photonics maker space at the FSU to facilitate innovation processes between research, industry, and open maker culture.

Our remote-controllable experiments were implemented using our home build XRTwinLab - an open-source framework to virtualize experimental setups and make them remotely accessible via Extended Reality (XR) technology. This framework consists of pre-built modules that can be easily adapted by educators and research staff, even those with no previous knowledge of software development. Open web technologies are used to enable platform-independent access without specific devices. We created 3D printable attachments that allow the addition of actuators and sensors to standard optical components. They are connected to a wireless network through microcontrollers. In the long term, the current GitHub repository used for development should serve as an open library for 3D models and source code to integrate a variety of hardware used in optics, photonics, and other research fields.

In this contribution we would like to present our Michelson interferometer experiment as a representative of our remote-controlled experiments. While the students carry out the experiment via a virtual interface, they control a real experimental setup in our laboratory. It is particularly important to us that a real experiment takes place, which confronts the students with all the challenges of a real environment, including systematic and statistical error sources like noise or other perturbations. We believe that a real experiment conveys the learning content more convincingly than a simulation that by design only reflects pre-defined assumptions made by the developers.

Discussing the range of functions of our educational lab setup in the context of the possible learning experience in this contribution, we additionally want to share the most recent feedback from our students on these experiments.

Keywords:

Remote lab, digital teaching, open source, photonics, STEM, higher education, optics.