Project
The e-Xperimenteren+ project is an innovative project in the field of remote experimenting for educational purposes for Dutch universities. The project was started after a successful pilot project that resulted in several remote experiments using NI LabVIEW.
The e-Xperimenteren+ project is financed by the Digitale Universiteit. It started in the third quarter of 2003 and finished in the first quarter of 2006.
Results
The DU e-Xperimenteren+ project resulted in a pool of physics experiments that can be accessed remotely through the internet. In this way, the costs of expensive experiments can be shared by several universities. By reducing the overall costs, and facilitating more easy integration of experiments into education, it is one of the goals to increase the usage of experiments within the higher education curriculum.
Some other benefits are:
- Possibility to offer experiments that would normally not be possible (such as experiments with dangerous radiation or experiments using very expensive or sensitive equipment)
- An increased control over the experimental environment, enabling a more efficient use of experiments in education
- An increased flexibility in time and place for the students performing the experiments.
The experiments are embedded in a software environment that features
- User accounts
- Storage of measured data and experiment logs
- A system to reserve time slots for each experiment
- A system with ‘experiment bundles’, determining the rights to reserve at certain moments for certain experiments and enabling the (financial) registration of experimentation time
- Monitoring of the status of the experiments.
A third result is a set of tools and manuals to easily expand the pool of experiments. These facilitate adding another experiment to the pool and using the software environment. It is an important goal of this project that the pool of experiments will expand after the project is finished.
Also, a very important aim of this project is to involve other universities, not only for using the pool of experiments, but also to contribute new experiments.