Enabling the Automatic Generation of User Interfaces for Remote Laboratories

Abstract

Abstract. Remote laboratories are an important component of blended and distance science and engineering education. By definition, they provide access to a physical lab in a distant location. Many architectures enabling remote laboratory systems exist, the most common of which are Client-Server based. In this context, the Server interfaces the physical setup and makes it software-accessible. The Smart Device Specifications revisit a Client-Server architecture, with the main aim of cancelling the dependencies which inherently exist between a Client and a Server. This is done by describing the Server as a set of services, which are exposed as well-defined APIs. If a remote laboratory is built following the Smart Device Specifications, any person with programming skills can create a personalized client application to access the lab. But in practice, teachers rely on the mediated contact with a lab provider to have information about what kind of experiment(s) the lab in question implements. Even though there is a complete description of the available sensors and actuators making up a lab and how to be accessed, it is not clear how they are connected (relationships). In this sense, a list of sensors and actuators are not enough to make a guided selection of components to create the interface to an experiment. Therefore, the aim of this work is to support teachers in choosing the experiments and creating the respective UI on their own, in a pedagogically oriented scenario and by taking into consideration the target online learning environment. This is done by revisiting the Smart Device Specifications and extending them, in addition to proposing a tool that will automatically generate the user interface of the chosen experiment(s).

A Scalable Architecture for the Dynamic Deployment of Multimodal Learning Analytics Applications in Smart Classrooms

“…The presented architecture could be of great value also for the remote lab community. While virtualization techniques had been already explored [27][28][29], this architecture could increase the flexibility of remote labs, by supporting the configuration and deployment of remote experiments [32]. Moreover, it supports the collection of multimodal data (coming both from hardware and software) necessary to support the smart adaptation to the learning process.…”

“…Finally, the Smart Device Specification [30,31] provided remote labs with interesting capabilities. This specification focused on removing dependencies between clients and servers while enabling the description of remote lab experiments, and the selection of particular remote lab configurations [32]. However, configurations were not flexible enough because these must be established in advance by the lab administrator.…”

Improving Technological Infrastructure of Distance Education through Trustworthy Platform-Independent Virtual Software Application Pools

“…This area uses server-client, 3-tier architecture, and standards for laboratory systems applied to different areas. These kinds of laboratories in the literature can address a specific subject or lecture and also on behavioral, cognitive, affective, and cognitive learning outcomes in higher education [20,21]. The developed approach that is appropriate for the curriculum is presented which is to enhance the overall student laboratory experience.…”

A full‐stack model proposal to remotely help the development of IoT sensor devices

“…They have presented a prototype of a reconfigurable device (chip), containing a programmable 10‐bit analog‐to‐digital converter, a programmable clock generator, and partial blocks of an artificial neural network, and the tool for programming and testing this device. The problem of automatic generation of user interfaces for remote laboratories was addressed, for example, in [13]. The authors used the Smart Device Specifications, and they also proposed a tool to automatically generate the user interface of the chosen experiment(s).…”