“Hands-on-Remote” Laboratories

The contribution brings a new solution for remote laboratories. Benefits and effectiveness of hands-on, virtual, and remote labs have been discussed for decades. We have been developing professional and DIY real remote labs for 15 years. Despite our efforts, real remote experiments are unfortunately not so easily feasible as traditional hands-on ones. Experimenting at schools split into three isolated approaches: traditional hands-on labs (including PC-aided experiments), virtual experiments (also simulations, applets), and remote experiments. Recently, some effort to integrate these approaches has appeared (e.g. integrated e-learning strategy) although the integration with hands-on experiments is still missing. This state can be explained by high complexity of remote labs and the other limits (budget, availability of HW and SW solution, etc.). Our aim is to show that real remote labs can be easily performed as traditional hands-on labs, and they can be created with both professional equipment and cheap hardware components like Arduino. The goal is an introduction of a new experiment type “hands-on-remote” that is simultaneously hands-on and remotely controlled without need for further modifications. Students themselves may create such experiment or just observe the setup prepared by their teacher, and even operate it remotely by their mobile devices (BYOD). Students may access the experiment from the classroom, school building, and perhaps from their homes after school. Examples of remote labs based both on professional measurement system iSES and Arduino-Uno platform will be presented. Beginners need only an Arduino Uno board with sensors, our freely downloadable “Remduino Lab SDK”.