Integrating Computational Notebooks into Cyber-Physical Laboratories for Engineering and Science Education with Application in Thermal Fluid Systems

• Autores: Oswaldo Vanegas Guillén
• Directores de la Tesis: Javier Muñoz Antón (dir. tes.)
• Lectura: En la Universidad Politécnica de Madrid ( España ) en 2024
• Idioma: inglés
• Tribunal Calificador de la Tesis: Alberto Abánades Velasco (presid.), Susana Sánchez Orgaz (secret.), Fernando Varela Díez (voc.), Ana Tejero González (voc.), María Jesús Santos Sánchez (voc.)
• Programa de doctorado: Programa de Doctorado en Energía Sostenible Nuclear y Renovable por la Universidad Politécnica de Madrid
• Calificación: Sobresaliente
• Materias:
  • Ciencias tecnológicas
    • Tecnología de la instrumentación
      • Equipo de laboratorio
    • Procesos tecnológicos
      • Transferencia de calor
  • Pedagogía
    • Organización y planificación de la educación
• Enlaces
  • Tesis en acceso abierto en: Archivo Digital UPM
• Resumen

  • Cyber-physical laboratories have been an evolving technology since their initial implementations before the current millennium. The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated their deployment and usage worldwide, as educational and research resources became physically inaccessible. Cyber-physical laboratories are a type of online laboratory that allows participants to remotely operate real educational equipment through a computer network. Both online laboratories and computational notebooks have become essential tools in the fields of engineering and science education, significantly enhancing the teaching and learning experience with shared aspects, such as high interactivity, space for exploration and research, and the potential for expansion thanks to the web environment where these tools are often deployed. Despite the benefits of remote laboratories, and although architectures, models, and tools have been proposed to facilitate their implementation, challenges remain in the development lifecycle and integration with educational materials in the experiment session. The integration of computational notebooks in remote laboratories has the potential to contribute technologically and educationally to these challenges. This study proposes a novel architecture that simplifies the development and management of remote experiments using a publisher-subscriber communication paradigm to securely and efficiently integrate WebAssembly computational notebooks. This approach addresses the aforementioned challenges with two main solutions: the implementation of decoupled communication to simplify the development of thermal fluid laboratory stations and their integration with a remote laboratory system, and the integration of computational notebooks into this system, establishing a complete workflow for the lifecycle of thermal fluid experiments. This decoupled approach based on publisher-subscriber communication eliminates the need for additional infrastructure for communication at laboratory stations and simplifies the integration of the laboratory station with the remote laboratory system, which requires nothing more than a publish-subscribe client to communicate. The integration of computational notebooks offers the possibility to add and create multiple types of interactive and code-generated content, allowing laboratory administrators and teachers to enhance the scope, clarity, precision, and interactivity of the contents. Thanks to WebAssembly, this proposal avoids the need for specialized servers to deploy notebooks, as all operations, calculations, and data processing are executed locally in the user's web browser. To implement this proposal, a Remote Laboratory Management System (RLMS) interoperable with virtual learning environments was designed and implemented. The RLMS includes notebook creation, learning scenarios, and grading tools. For this project, a laboratory station comprising a test bench for thermal fluid systems was built, developed, and implemented in detailed key stages. This laboratory station features remote educational experiments to characterize and evaluate the performance of heat exchangers, developed from a prior analysis of the requirements and objectives of the competencies to be developed. Several quality criteria categorized into technological, educational, and accessibility groups were quantitatively evaluated using the responses from seventy participants from two different universities. The analysis highlights both the advantages and challenges of the proposal, with significant emphasis on interaction, scalability, reusability, interoperability, and accessibility. The results confirmed the effectiveness of the notebooks in each phase of remote experiments, demonstrating an increase in student participation and active, autonomous exploration.