It's a typical day in the lab: Walk to your assigned lab bench. Wait for the teaching assistant to set up equipment. Load a sample, set a few knobs and begin taking measurements. Click on the information icon hovering over a particular knob on the machine if you want to learn more about it.
Welcome to the virtual lab, a digital re-creation of the nuclear, plasma and radiological engineering (NPRE) undergraduate laboratory. The virtual lab is a detailed first-person video game developed to guide freshmen through basic lab setup and procedure, though it soon could provide a training environment for advanced classes in nuclear engineering and beyond.
“As the discussion of online education continues to grow, the one topic I don’t hear being discussed is lab exercises and how are we going to get them online,” said Imran Haddish, a May 2012 NPRE graduate who did much of the programming and software development. “Online labs with realistic rendering, multiuser capabilities and natural interaction are nonexistent in online education. Using these types of labs, instructors are only limited by their imaginations as we can build any environment and scenario.”
Virtual Lab was born as a way to address space and time constraints. When labs were introduced in the NPRE 100 curriculum, enrollment was about 15 students per year. But recent years have seen enrollment swell to about 60 students per year – more than could fit in the lab. The instructor, NPRE professor Rizwan Uddin, was forced to cut one of the two lab activities so that the space could accommodate multiple sections of the course.
With the virtual lab software, the students can experience both labs: one in the physical space, and one in the virtual space. While they are doing the first experiment in the lab, the instructors demonstrate the second experiment so students can see what it looks like before performing the activity in the virtual lab. Virtual lab is like any other video game, with sufficient instructions for the students to conduct the experiment. Of course, the virtual experiments can be conducted from anywhere there is a computer and an Internet connection.
“I felt as though the virtual lab and physical lab in NPRE 100 were very similar to each other,” said Justin Weberski, a freshman from St. Charles, Ill., who took the class last fall. “Being introduced to these experiences, even if it’s only virtually, is a great benefit to most students. I feel like the virtual lab can add a lot to the classroom, but at the same time it cannot completely replace the real-life lab because it is still very important to gain hands-on experience with using the different equipment in the lab.”
To help students connect their hands-on lab experience to their digital one, the virtual lab is a painstaking replica of the physical lab space, right down to the table surfaces and electrical socket placement. Information is also available in the form of embedded videos. There are information icons, in the form of a little blue “I,” on or near some of the equipment in the lab. Clicking on the icon opens a short video of a lab teaching assistant explaining what the equipment or switch does – just as the TA would do if the student asked the question in person.
While it was created to address concerns of space and time, the virtual lab encourages student creativity and gives instructors more flexibility in planning curriculum.
“The students would tell me, ‘These labs are such cookbook-style labs.’ They are not expected to make any mistakes; they are given very precise instructions as to what to do,” Uddin said. “They learn something, but the step-by-step instructions are not serving the purpose of a real lab, where you can make mistakes, and you can design new experiments. In a virtual lab, you can afford for them to make a mistake, to break things, to do things wrong, to blow things up.”
In addition to giving students room to explore and make mistakes, the virtual lab offers opportunities to conduct experiments that would be too time-consuming, expensive or dangerous to conduct in the physical lab. For example, with the virtual lab, the instructors could give the students an unknown material and ask them to identify it by measuring the half-life, melting point or other properties. Or they could work with strong radiation sources that could not be handled in the undergraduate lab space.
The students, particularly those well-versed in video games, responded positively. However, there was one missing feature that students clamored for: a fast-forward button. Currently, all processes in the virtual lab occur in real time, to give students a feel for how long the data collection takes in the real lab. Adding a fast-forward button would cut down on the time required to complete a lab, and would also enable instructors to include activities that otherwise would take too long – measuring the 5,700-year half-life of carbon 14, for example. The software development team is working to add additional features after the beta-test in fall 2012.
“I feel that as the virtual lab continues to evolve and improve, the lab could provide students with educational experiences that they would otherwise not get to experience until being trained in their future careers,” Weberski said.
The development team also hopes to expand the virtual lab technology to include other labs. They already have created a virtual model of the undergraduate chemistry lab in Noyes Annex. The “game” is programmed to be a training exercise that shows students where the safety equipment is located in the lab and tests them on safety procedures. Uddin also hopes to program activities for some of the more advanced NPRE courses. In particular, he hopes to re-create the campus reactor, which was dismantled in 2010, to once again offer students reactor-based experiments.
“There’s a lot of processing power within modern computers that allows us to make more realistic and interactive experiences,” Haddish said. “The availability of all these features with realistic rendering, in an educational lab, is not common – that’s what makes this novel. At the same time, we have not even begun to fully utilize game engines (or any other types of 3D rendering engines) in online education.”
And all Mario had were bricks and sewer pipes.