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Learning by Doing from Afar: Mobilizing the Internet of Things to Enrich Remote Learning

The consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic have introduced acute challenges to traditional approaches of engi-neering education. Without direct and regular access to physical equipment in laboratories, the opportunities for engineering students to practice ‘learning by doing’ has been greatly reduced or curtailed. This paper presents our attempt to demonstrate a simple, efficient, and effective method of approximating the hands-on experience of manipulating lab equipment by using an 'Internet of Things' (IoT) approach, which involves networked physical objects and the use of embedded software, sensors, and other technologies to facilitate control and exchange of data over the internet. While a few other researchers have also started experimenting with IoT in test labs, our approach differs sharply in some key ways. Instead of building entirely new IoT-integrated equipment for a given lesson, our approach is to adapt traditional lab equipment for remote use by making a number of small changes, which keep things simple to operate and cost-effective. As a result, students can connect to the laboratory facilities remotely and conduct experiments and gather data on their own. In this initial project, the target lab was a lesson on 'controls' consisting of solenoid valves as controllable actuators, high voltage controllable switch, and a series of sensors and web-cameras as monitoring facilities. Using a desktop remote control app, students make a connection to the university laboratory computers. The preliminary results provide a proof of concept for remotely control laboratories for undergraduate students in engineering that allow them to perform experiments in a fixable yet reliable manner. The implications for methods of enhancing remote learning extend beyond pandemic conditions