Flipping the remote lab with low cost rapid prototyping technologies

Abstract

This work proposes the idea of flipping the remote lab. A flipped remote lab would consist on requesting students to build a remotely accessible experiment, so that teachers would test the lab in order to evaluate it, instead of creating it themselves. Building a remote lab is a multidisciplinary activity that involves using different skills and which promotes long-life learning and creativity. Also, by assigning this task to work in groups, students would also build up abilities such as teamwork, communication and leadership. Because creating a remote lab is a complex task, the idea is to use the experience acquired during many years of development and use of virtual and remote labs for teaching engineering and physics, to simplify the process and make it manageable for students. Given the current state of the technology, providing students with some guidelines and reference designs should be enough to make feasible for them to develop a remote experiment.