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iLabs Will Allow Students To Perform Tests Anywhere, Anytime Via Webcam, Remote Controls

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have received a $1 million grant to take the concept of online laboratories, or iLabs, and put them into high schools.

iLabs are experimental facilities that can be accessed through the internet, allowing students to complete experiments from anywhere at any time via a webcam and remote controls. But the labs are not to be confused with the virtual world. The high-tech equipment is real and yields real scientific data.

“Students are always online and very tech-savvy now,” Kemi Jona, director of the Office of Science, Technology, Engineering and Math Education Partnerships (OSEP) at Northwestern University and the project’s lead author, said. “So the fact that they don’t get to touch the device doesn’t faze them at all.”

To integrate iLabs into regular high school science curricula, Jona hopes to turn the website into a hub where students and educators can go to find, share, and access facilities, similar to an eBay-type marketplace.

Right now, the nine instruments available on the site include an inverted pendulum at the University of Queensland in Australia and several at MIT: a microelectronics device characterization lab, a dynamic signal analyzer, an educational laboratory virtual instrumentation suite, a polymer crystallization experiment, a shake table, a heat exchanger, a force on a dipole lab, and neutron spectroscopy labs.

Jona has begun testing instruments in the class of Mark Vondracek, who teaches advanced physics in Illinois. His class was able to use iLabs to access a Geiger counter and measure a radioactive source to complete an experiment in radioactivity.

Northwestern University will put some of its devices online starting this year and will conduct a formal pilot test of iLabs in fall 2009 with teachers and students around the country.

“The fact that you can control it from 8,000 miles away is cool,” Vondracek said. “You can’t do true science within a classroom environment anyhow. Nowadays people don’t have the time or the facilities.” The researcher hopes that once iLabs are made a permanent part of the classroom, they will help students learn to think more like scientists.

Jona hopes that iLabs will help close the gap between schools with many facilities to share and those with less to work with. He is bringing iLabs to the Chicago Public School system and other school districts that lack resources.

“My vision is to level the playing field in terms of providing better and more equal access for students regardless of where they live. There’s already some work going on with iLabs in Africa where there really are few resources available,” he said. “Ultimately, I hope to create a worldwide resource that brings more students into science and scientific careers”. AGENCIES