In recent years, remote laboratories have become integral to modern education, offering flexibility and accessibility compared to traditional, in-person labs. Integrating AI-powered assistance into remote labs has the potential to give them an edge by providing personalized learning experiences. This paper explores an innovative approach to promoting independent learning and critical thinking by embedding AI-driven support, using OpenAI's GPT-4 model, into a remote Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) laboratory. Through a web-based code editor, students write SystemVerilog programs and receive tailored assistance from the AI, while their designs are deployed on a Terasic DEl-SoC FPGA development board with real-time feedback via a live camera feed. The study, which involved students from an advanced digital design course interacting with the AI assistant, revealed strong engagement and positive feedback. Preliminary results indicate that AI-powered guidance can meaningfully boost student involvement, providing a scalable and effective framework for fostering active learning in engineering education.

In this Research-to-Practice paper, we detail the development and implementation of a 3D Digital Twinning simulator augmented with Virtual Reality (VR) capabilities, specifically designed for an embedded systems curriculum. With the rise in technology-enhanced learning tools, there has been a marked shift towards creating robust platforms that allow students to interact more deeply with their coursework. Digital Twinning and 3D virtual simulations have emerged as significant contributors to this shift. The challenge in most design-oriented courses lies in the integration of multiple tools and hardware components. Students often find themselves investing significant time in the setup and configuration of these components, time that could otherwise be devoted to the core learning objectives. Our 3D simulator was developed to alleviate this burden. It intends to offer a clear, intuitive visualization of tasks, allowing students to focus on designing and testing their implementations. This simulator does not just represent a theoretical concept but provides a realistic, interactive environment replicating real-world scenarios. One of the central case studies highlighted in this paper is the transition from a traditional FPGA-based digital design assignment-a car parking lot scenario with switches and breadboards-to an equivalent, but more immersive, 3D virtual simulation. This redesigned model boasts seamless interfacing capabilities with a remote FPGA lab, further bridging the gap between theoretical learning and practical application. To gauge the effectiveness and utility of our simulator, we conducted an anonymous survey among the participating students. The survey aimed to capture feedback on the usability, intuitiveness, and overall educational value of the Digital Twinning simulation. Preliminary findings from our study suggest a positive trend: Digital Twinning, combined with the immersive properties of VR, has the potential to significantly improve engagement, comprehension, and performance. This research underlines the evolving dynamics of education, where traditional methods are gradually being complemented, if not replaced, by technology-enhanced approaches. The results presented in this paper strongly suggest the potential benefits and adaptability of Digital Twinning in the contemporary educational landscape.

CAN bus is a very important communications protocol. Its usage is extended to many applications and it is key to know some fundamentals in an introductory course to industrial communications. A collaborative experience between the Public University of Navarra has permitted students of Industrial Technologies Engineering and Electrical and Electronic Engineering to access a remote laboratory where they can progress in the development of a project where they must implement a CAN bus client and server for monitoring the parameters of a vehicle. More than twenty parameters can be monitored and the remote laboratory is 24 hours a day accessible, which permits students to work at home and progress more in the multiprotocol project they develop at the university. The interface and some code examples are shown, along with some statistics that demonstrate the utilization of the tool by the students with the aid of some evaluation measurements taken by the lecturer. Finally, a survey was performed to the students in order to understand better the potential of the remote laboratory assisted teaching as well as to know where to improve it in the next future.

This document reflects the contribution of a group of experts in the VISIR (Virtual Instrument Systems in Reality) remote lab, regarding recent advances, initiatives, federation, limitations and future. The methodology for gathering their opinion consisted of a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) analysis on VISIR, following three categories: Technical, Pedagogical and Educational. Major conclusions point to: (1) a need for new technical developments taking advantage of collaborative work; (2) a window of opportunity for expanding VISIR to other institutions, namely in developing countries; and (3) improving the interface for a better pedagogical experience, namely with better error feedback or the inclusion of a virtual tutor.

A remote laboratory is a hardware and software solution that enables students to interact with real equipment located somewhere else on the internet. This way, students interact with a real laboratory as if they were on a hands-on-lab session. Once the equipment is remote, it is also possible to share it among institutions, so students from one school or university can access a lab in another university. While there is an interest by many universities of sharing their laboratories, and there are several experiences doing so, the impact has been typically limited. One of the reasons for the limited impact is the lack of robustness in most solutions due to technical issues, which leads to a lack of trust and interest by the potential consumers. LabsLand is a spin-off of the WebLab-Deusto research group which sells access to laboratories of universities to other schools and universities. This contribution analyzes through use cases what are the technical and organizational pitfalls that were found in the process of taking real laboratories and making them available commercially and what are the solutions used to tackle the issues arisen.

Interactive live streaming is a key feature of applications and platforms in which the actions of the viewers affect the content of the stream. In those, a minimal capture-display delay is critical. Though recent technological advances have certainly made it possible to provide web-based interactive live-streaming, little research is available that compares the real-world performance of the different web-based schemes. In this paper we use educational remote laboratories as a case study. We analyze the restrictions that web-based interactive live-streaming applications have, such as a low delay. We also consider additional characteristics that are often sought in production systems, such as universality and deployability behind institutional firewalls. The paper describes and experimentally compares the most relevant approaches for the study. With the provided descriptions and real-world experimental results, researchers, designers and developers can: a) select among the interactive live-streaming approaches which are available for their real-world systems, b) decide which one is most appropriate for their purpose, and c) know what performance and results they can expect.

A remote laboratory is a software and hardware tool that enables students to access real equipment located somewhere else through the Internet. The laboratories are typically deployed in universities or research centers. A key factor of remote laboratories is that once they are available through the Internet their usage can be scaled up and used by students of other institutions. Thus, two or more institutions can share different equipment to reduce costs. Furthermore, this enables a sharing economy where multiple providers provide access to their laboratories to each other, freely or not. However, while the number of remote laboratory initiatives is high, the overall impact of these laboratories is fairly limited beyond the scope of the host institution or the scope (and duration) of projects in which the host institution is involved. The focus of this contribution is to outline a novel initiative addressing this scaling problem. After over 10 years working on the area our research group has started a spin-off focused on this topic, called LabsLand. A key factor of this spin-off is to provide a platform similar to other sharing economy marketplaces, aiming to provide features commonly ignored in the remote laboratories literature such as trust, accurate reliability or different pricing schemes for different scenarios.

Developing educational apps that cover a wide range of learning contexts and languages is a challenging task. In this paper, we introduce the AppComposer Web app to address this issue. The AppComposer aims at empowering teachers to easily translate and adapt existing apps that fit their educational contexts. Developers do not need to provide extensive translations and configurations of their apps and can simply follow certain guidelines to make their apps translatable and adaptable by the AppComposer. Since the AppComposer makes use of the standard internationalization specification used by OpenSocial, even external apps can be translated without contacting the original developer.

Educational remote laboratories are software and hardware tools that allow students to remotely access real equipment located in universities as if they were in a hands-on-lab session. Federations of these remote laboratories have existed for years, focused on allowing two universities to share their equipment. Additionally, the integration of remote laboratories in Learning Tools-LT-(Learning Management Systems, Content Management Systems or Personal Learning Environments) has been achieved in the past in order to integrate remote laboratories as part of the learning curricula, being part of the practice exercises or even as a tool of evaluation. An cross-institutional initiative called gateway4labs has been created to perform this integration through federation protocols. In this contribution, this initiative adds support for OpenSocial as a new protocol for Learning Tools (in particular, for EPFL Graasp), as well as for the iLab Shared Architecture (in addition to WebLab-Deusto and UNR FCEIA laboratories already supported). Supporting OpenSocial opens a number of new technical and organizational challenges since public labs should be supported without registering students, teachers or schools. The focus of this contribution is to show these challenges and how they are tackled in the proposed open source implementation.

Nowadays, a large number of online laboratories are available and deployed throughout the world. Most of them are sponsored by universities and often only used by their home institution, because they tend to be dedicated to the needs of their creators. However, in many cases these labs provide successful experiences and other teachers would wish to incorporate them into their classroom activities and to embrace Learning-by-Experience methodologies. Currently, they cannot do that effectively without first tailoring the lab experience to their own teaching style and the educational background of their students. This can be a complicated affair, due the closed nature of many online labs and the steep learning curve of the few tools that allow customization. This paper describes the work on an application builder, named App Composer, which aims to make it easy for school teachers to create their own customized applications from existing ones. Different customization levels are provided, each one powered by a different type of composer. For instance, teachers will be able to easily translate an application into a new language, or to start with a template and create a customized version of an application. The App Composer makes use of Graasp and Open Social - a widely-used, interoperable and open technology.

This paper describes the integration of a remote lab in a tool for educational digital circuits. Boole-Deusto is an educational software tool featuring truth tables, Karnaugh maps, Boolean expressions, finite-state machines and digital circuits. After creating the design through Boole-Deusto, the user can implement the circuit in a remote lab (WebLab-Deusto) with only a few mouse clicks. The user does not need the technical knowledge, time, hardware equipment and specialized software that would normally be required. These conveniences benefit teachers and students alike, especially those involved in basic courses in digital electronics, both at the university and high school levels.

LabVIEW is a development environment from National Instruments, focused on the automation of processing and measuring equipment, and it is and has been for years a crucial tool in Educational Remote Laboratories. Three features are key for this success: a) a visual programming language called G, so developers don't need to work with traditional “text” programming languages, therefore achieving a wider range of experiment developers; b) a strong industrial support and c) the “Remote Panels”, where the developer publishes the application automatically in a web browser. However, Remote Panels require a plug-in to run, not available for mobile devices neither all browsers in operating systems, and it clearly breaks with the ongoing web development trends, more interested in HTML5. This contribution shows how LabVIEW Remote Panels are used in Remote Laboratories, describing its inclusion in the WebLab-Deusto platform, and it describes the advantages and disadvantages of its use, comparing it with other existing approaches.

The paper shows the results of an integration of the remote laboratory WebLab-Deusto-PLD at the "Programmable Logic" course of the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Deusto (Spain). Presented herein is a technical overview of the laboratory, a description of access to it, and an analysis of the user experience derived from conducted surveys since 2004. The surveys' analysis shows a correlation between two advantages of the remote experimentation: efficiency/usefulness and immersion/control. The prospective work includes an improving the WebLab-Deusto usability, an extension of the capabilities of the overall system and further its implementation in curricula.