Contribution: Student engagement and interest in engineering is compared between virtual and physical laboratory projects, designed to be realistic and replicate engineering practice. Reported motivation and engagement was greater in the virtual project than the physical projects. Results are interpreted in terms of the different affordances for…

Contribution: This paper presents the "PBL classroom model," an agent-based simulation (ABS) that allows testing of several scenarios of a project-based learning (PBL) application by considering different levels of soft-skills, and students' perception of the methodology. Background: While the community has made great advances in…

Within the field of electric power systems, the study of electrical equipment can be frustrating and demotivating because of the lack of a clear vision of how this equipment functions and operates in a real environment. The use of virtual reality can provide a more concrete representation for students, who rarely have the opportunity to visit a…

This paper reports empirical evidence on having students use AR-SaBEr, a simulation tool based on augmented reality (AR), to discover the basic principles of electricity through a series of experiments. AR-SaBEr was enhanced with knowledge-based support and inquiry-based scaffolding mechanisms, which proved useful for discovery learning in…

As part of an instrumentation course, a problem-based learning framework was selected for laboratory instruction. Two acquisition chains were designed to help students carry out realistic instrumentation problems. The first tool is a virtual (simulated) modular acquisition chain that allows rapid overall understanding of the main problems in…

Augmented reality (AR) provides huge opportunities for online teaching in science and engineering, as these disciplines place emphasis on practical training and unsuited to completely nonclassroom training. This paper proposes a new concept in virtual and remote laboratories: the augmented remote laboratory (ARL). ARL is being tested in the first…

This paper presents a new environment for teaching practical work in AI subjects. The main purpose of this environment is to make AI techniques more appealing to students and to facilitate the use of the toolkits which are currently widely used in research and development. This new environment has a toolkit for developing and executing agents,…