The increasing emphasis on STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) education globally and the rapid development of Artificial Intelligence (AI) have highlighted the importance of equipping students with technical skills, people skills, and computational thinking. These competencies are critical for addressing the challenges of modern work environments and fostering innovative solutions. This paper presents an educational initiative that combines interactive activities, including the “Marshmallow Challenge” and Tinkercad-based coding, with the “SS Chatbot UAN,” an AI-powered tool designed to enhance learning outcomes. Conducted with secondary school students aged 14–16, this project aimed to strengthen teamwork, communication, and problem-solving skills while promoting confidence in sequential coding tasks. The findings demonstrate significant improvements in students’ collaboration and computational thinking, supported by high engagement and satisfaction levels. This study underscores the transformative potential of integrating AI technologies and experiential learning methodologies into pre-university STEM education.

The evaluation of Cyber-Physical Production Systems (CPPS) using Digital Twin (DT) architectures and Asset Administration Shells (AAS) is critical for advancing flexible, autonomous, and human-centric manufacturing environments. However, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), particularly in Latin America, face significant barriers to adopting and evaluating these technologies due to resource limitations, complexity, and lack of standardized frameworks. This paper proposes a scalable and modular evaluation framework specifically designed for SMEs, integrating DTs for real-time simulation and monitoring, AAS for semantic interoperability, and simulation-based assessment methods to measure CPPS autonomy, flexibility, and resilience. A comprehensive review of recent approaches, trends, challenges, and research gaps highlights the urgent need for dynamic, standardized, and cognitive-enabled evaluation methodologies. The proposed framework addresses these needs by formalizing production knowledge through ontologies, synchronizing physical systems with digital models, and enabling systematic performance evaluation across diverse production scenarios. A case study conducted in a Latin American manufacturing SME demonstrates the practical application of the framework, showing improvements in production efficiency, decision transparency, and system adaptability. The results underline the framework’s potential to democratize access to advanced Industry 4.0 solutions for SMEs, fostering more resilient and intelligent manufacturing ecosystems. By bridging current technological gaps, this work contributes to accelerating the digital transformation of SMEs and supports the broader goals of Industry 5.0. Future research will explore the integration of explainable AI techniques and expand the framework’s applicability to multi-site production networks.

The COVID-19 pandemic posed great challenges for Engineering Education. For Latin America higher education institutions, the greatest changes were total virtuality, distance education, collaborations between educational entities, labs, and connectivity problems. The return to in-person attendance has brought new challenges to engineering schools, such as the low motivation of teachers and students in this new transition, as well as the possible lags of students in the acquisition of practical skills that online laboratories and digital courses could not develop. Additionally, other related organizations, such as professional or educational societies faced challenges such as retention of members, running virtual conferences, and maintaining fiscal viability. The main objective of this work is to make known the challenges in Engineering Education in the post-pandemic era in Latin America, the initiatives the nonprofit Latin American and Caribbean Consortium of Engineering Institutions (LACCEI) has developed to address these challenges and promote best practices so that Engineering Education institutions in Latin America can face them, and the need to scale these initiatives through collaboration among academic, gobernmental, industry and organizations.

This Innovative Practice full paper presents the use of video conference systems to access online laboratory stations. Online laboratories are a solution for institutions that offer online or blended educational programs and want to offer hands-on training to their students, and for institutions that do not have the infrastructure to set up some specific experiments. They are defined as an alternative to provide remote access through internet connection to real equipment or virtual experiments located in another place. The use of online laboratories can reduce costs in terms of space, equipment, maintenance, personnel, among others. Most of the laboratory stations available in laboratory rooms in educational institutions include some type of software installed in a computer that allows the students to setup, configure, and program the laboratory equipment for their experiments. These software systems can be proprietary systems provided by the manufacturer of the laboratory equipment, and also can be systems provided by third party companies. This paper presents an alternative method of accessing and controlling laboratory stations using functionalities available in video communication platforms such as Zoom or Microsoft Teams, that offer options for remote controlling of a computer and can receive feedback from the shared screen feature. In this scheme, an external controller is attached to the laboratory equipment to provide bidirectional commands interchange between the user computer and the laboratory station. As part of the outcome of this work, a functional prototype of an online laboratory was made applying an alternative scheme that uses the communication system Zoom API. This prototype enables a Zoom session between the user and the local laboratory machine to interact with the first party software installed in the machine.

This Innovative Practice full paper presents a software system which purpose is to be used to compose online laboratory experiences.Online Laboratories have improved their reliability and interoperability thanks to innovative developments proposed in recent years. New companies in this area have proposed novel interaction mechanisms such as the inclusion of immersive graphic user interfaces as well as the possibilities for access laboratory experiments as a service, having the alternative of just paying for the laboratory services demanded, for an specific class or for individual users. In terms of technology it is now possible to have multiple laboratory instances running from a single laboratory infrastructure or laboratory station. In terms of standardization, big efforts have been made by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and the community of Online Laboratories to release in 2019 the first standard 18762019 - IEEE Standard for Networked Smart Learning Objects for Online Laboratories.The software system presented in this work uses a set of available resources including virtual laboratories (simulation based), local laboratory equipment, remote laboratories, laboratory activities, assessment definition and learning content (text, audio, video, etc). The system provides to the users a friendly set of tools to compose their laboratory experiences, following the IEEE 1876-2019 standard definition. The output composed laboratory experiment is saved as a Smart Laboratory Learning Object (SLLO) including mechanisms to be self-adaptable according to variables such as laboratory activities difficulty level, user previous results on the same or similar laboratory activities, and user expertise in the topic (determined based on information retrieved from the Learning Management System LMS).

Online laboratories provide educational institutions the opportunity to offer experimentation experiences for both online and face to face courses. The lack of online laboratories have made it a challenge to offer online engineering courses that require a laboratory, such as Electronic Circuits, Control Systems, Physics, Logic Design among others. An online laboratory station could be used by different users for multiple purposes if there was a mechanism to easily vary the problem, the context, and the activities of the lab. Smart Laboratory Learning Objects (SLLOs) allow developers to connect different user interfaces to control the same online laboratory by including information on connections, lab station controls, and lab activities. This paper presents the concept of a Smart Adaptive Remote Laboratory System that complies with the recently approved standard IEEE 1876 Networked Smart Learning for Online Laboratories [1] and a set of demonstration online laboratories that have been developed in the context of digital electronics and support smart adaptability provided by the system or manually defined by the lab administrators.

Academic Integrity Assurance (AIA) is a continuing concern for every aspect and at all levels of education. An iterative approach is required to maintain effective countermeasures to ensure an institution's reputation. Students will continue to invent new ways to challenge the assurance process. This paper explores the uses of various technologies and tools to maintain AIA in engineering classes and labs. The course Introduction to Logic Design at Florida Atlantic University offers three to five classes with two hundred to three fifty hundred students per semester. Teaching assistants enter online the lab grades and on the student's grading sheet as a backup, presenting several challenges with AIA. Examples of using technology to maintain AIA: The grading sheet security features include: security paper, holographic barcode security label, and watermarks. Students are required to upload lab images within one hour of lab grade entry. The professor reviews these images to confirm each student lab is unique. Any grade entry conflicts are verified by accessing the data logs. Verifying lab reports metadata tracking information. Using a spectrum analyzer while proctoring exams to observe the radio spectrum bands of cell phones, WiFi and Bluetooth devices. These methods and tools help ensure AIA.

Online laboratories can exhibit smarter behavior when information about the user and his/her context is given as an input to the lab. Part of this data can be gathered from a virtual learning environment (VLE) or any other educational system that contains information about the user. Information provided for these systems include: the type of user (student, teacher, administrator), user current level of experience (amount of time performing lab experiments, background knowledge) and results obtained in previous lab experiences. Additional context information can be provided by the user device, such as the geographical location, device type, bandwidth, date and time, among others. With this information, the online laboratory system can offer different variations of laboratories to each user and customize the experiment interfaces and activities in terms of task difficulty level, situational context and support information. The user interactions and administrative information can be collected and stored in the Learner Record Store (LRS) in the form of xAPI statements, ready to be accessed by the VLE to update the current state of the user information and extract/perform learning analytics. This paper presents the design and implementation of a model to integrate xAPI technology with online laboratories demonstrations that includes the VLE integration and user context information as part of the online lab experience.

Remote Laboratories are used in educational settings as tools to give students access to experiments that are not physically available to them at their institutions. During implementation, problems such as: bandwidth, security or limitations in terms of the usability, have been identified. This paper proposes an approach that integrates, what we call, a Smart Adaptive Remote Laboratory (SARL) with Virtual Learning Environments (VLE) to improve the students' experience by automatically adapting the experiments according to the student's current level of knowledge and experience. For this purpose, the laboratory experiment is connected with the VLE to access the student profile and academic information. This information is used by the SARL to adapt the educational content and the experimental interfaces accordingly. All students access the same set of equipment, but the adaptive system shows a variation of the graphic user interface with different controls and activities. The VLE provides the assessment component, completing the learning experience. The results of the experiments are stored in the remote laboratory system and sent back to the VLE to update the student information. A Raspberry Pi microcontroller and a web camera are used as hardware of the remote interface. The prototype software platform was implemented using Python and JavaScript languages and HTML 5 interface. The paper presents the design of the remote laboratory, the software integration model, and describes the details about the implementation of the prototype using this SARL strategy.

Recent advances in technology have allowed the development of laboratory experiments that do not require the physical presence of a student in a physical laboratory. These experiments are conducted using the internet, using simulation, or actual control and monitoring of real equipment located remotely, or a hybrid of both. This allows potential sharing of resources that could result in reduction in budgets for equipment, personnel and brick-and-mortal space. Remote labs can facilitate offering lab courses online. Besides the technical challenges, there are safety, security, connectivity and scheduling concerns. The IEEE Education Society has formed a Working Group that is developing the Standard for Networked Smart Learning Objects for Online Laboratories (IEEE-SA P1876). Once the standard is adopted, there will be more opportunities to connect resources among universities, potentially producing distributed online laboratories. This paper looks at the design of a network of remote laboratories for Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC). The LAC regions adds to the complexity of the proposed network because of its great diversity. Languages, educational systems, academic schedules, time zones are just some of the aspects in which the diversity is appreciable. This creates a challenging environment to develop collaborative strategies which generate benefits to all. The Latin American and Caribbean Consortium of Engineering Institutions (LACCEI) is participating in the IEEE P1876 Standard Working Group; with plans to develop a Remote Laboratories Network for the LAC region, collaborating under the Engineering for the Americas initiative and the OAS Ministers of Science and Technology's Working Group 2: Human Capacity Building and Education. This paper presents some existing networks in the region, and proposes a general design and architecture specification of administrative and technical aspects for the LACCEI network for remote laboratories.

Abstract To protect against security attacks, it is necessary to be aware of typical risks and to have a good understanding of how vulnerabilities can be exploited. Security patterns are useful to guide the security design of systems by providing generic solutions that can stop a variety of attacks, but it is not clear to an inexperienced designer what pattern should be applied to stop a specific attack. Additionally, security patterns are not useful for network forensics purposes because they do not emphasize the modus operandi of the attack. As a complement and improvement, we have proposed a new type of pattern, the misuse pattern. This pattern describes, from the point of view of the attacker, how a type of information misuse is performed, analyzes the ways of stopping the attack, and considers how to trace the attack once it has happened. To apply this approach, we need a catalog of misuse patterns. In this paper, we restrict our interest to voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) and we present a set of typical and frequent misuse patterns for VoIP: denial of service (DoS), call interception, theft of service, and call hijacking on VoIP. These patterns could be the start of a comprehensive catalog that would be of practical value to developers, testers, users, and researchers. Published in 2009 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The formal analysis described here detects two so far undetected real deadlock situations per thousand C source files or million lines of code in the open source Linux operating system kernel, and three undetected accesses to freed memory, at a few seconds per file. That is notable because the code has been continuously under scrutiny from thousands of developers' pairs of eyes. In distinction to mo del-checking techniques, which also use symbolic logic, the analysis uses a "3-phase" compositional Hoare-style programming logic combined with abstract interpretation. The result is a customisable post-hoc semantic analysis of C code that is capable of several different analyses at once

This paper introduces a denotational semantics for a core of the draft IEEE standard analog and mixed signal design language VHDL-AMS, and derives general results about the behaviour of VHDL-AMS programs from it. We include, for example, a demonstration that VHDL-AMS parallelism is benign in the absence of shared initializations. As proof of concept we have built an interpreted simulator that prototypes the semantics and which runs multi-process mixed analog and digital descriptions correctly.

We present techniques for constructing Z specifications from the analysis and design models of the Fusion method. We show how the specifications can be used to more closely tie the Fusion models together. In particular, we outline how the specifications can be used to support rigorous verification of Fusion design models against analysis models.

No abstract available.