Abstract:

The RIALE application is part of a project called IDEA (Innovazione Didattica E Apprendimento), which offers a multifunction platform for innovative learning applications , from which teachers and students develop learning scenarios, share them with peers and adapt those developed by others to make them more suitable to their specific objectives based on the school curriculum.

RIALE is both a Web and mobile environment for accessing remote laboratories and observing the scientific steps of experiments that can be live (researcher is actually doing the experiment) or on demand (the experiment is registered). Experiments main contents are normally a video, its corresponding time line, tagged and enriched with additional elements such as real-time data acquisition from sensors, audio, documents, graphs, images, articles, etc. that can be used as educational supports to the main video content. Video and enriched Time Line become an electronic portfolio of all stages of a specific single experiment, i.e. the educational situation.

In live mode and thanks to an Internet connection, the application allows to: remotely access lab sessions; interact with researchers as they are working in their laboratories and to save the multiple flux of generated data during the experiment Students have the opportunity to interact with the researchers before continuing with the analysis of collected experimental data, under the guidance of their reference teacher.

While working on demand, students access Lab. sessions in asynchronous mode. The stored experiments to be accessed were previously saved on IDEA cloud platform after being time tagged through Artificial Intelligence. The same flux of data can be viewed and students can collect data and proceed with their analysis.

Users/students can choose to follow the whole experiment or just part of it; observe/monitor it in real time or later on offline. Either way, the end-user can easily and remotely interact with the experiment, and monitor all its phases in a safe and self-sufficient way.

Each Time Line can be enriched with educational objects identified and/or created by teachers and students and placed in the most appropriate time segments. The width of the visualized time segment (window) can vary depending on the teacher’s indication to include a smaller or greater quantity of associated didactic objects and experimental data.

The school subjects dealt with by remote laboratories are biology (observation and / or interaction with images taken from real microscopes) and astronomy (remote connection to and control of real telescopes).

Keywords:

Artificial Intelligence, Remote Labs, Scientific Experiments, STEM.