Do Students Really Understand the Difference Between Simulation and Remote Labs?

Abstract

Laboratory experiments play a crucial role in engineering education as they strongly contribute to the development of important skills for the professional practice. This paper addresses a students’ understanding gap between simulations and remote labs. These two resources (and namely the remote laboratory VISIR - Virtual Instrument Systems in Reality) have been commonly used on several didactical implementations, along with other didactical resources in different Engineering degrees at the Federal University of Santa Catarina and Polytechnic of Porto School of Engineering. This work, developed in the scope of the VISIR+ Project, intends to evaluate students’ perceptions considering simulation and remote lab results. Quantitative and qualitative data were analyzed to better understand how deeply students realize the differences between these resources and their type of data. Preliminary results indicate that a considerable number of student’s don´t have a clear idea of these differences, even though sometimes they know their definition. Furthermore, this gap does not seem to differ much with the context (country, course, academic year, course content), students’ final grades, teacher approach or implemented tasks.