Automated experiments on EjsS laboratories

摘要

Experimentation in laboratories is a key pillar in the education of graduate and undergraduate students, who need to understand the fundamental concepts from both perspectives: theoretical and practical. High costs associated with equipment, space, and maintenance staff, impose certain constraints on resources for traditional laboratories. While, Virtual and Remote Laboratories can overcome these limitations, they present important limitations in their use. Some actions are repetitive in nature, cannot be executed trivially or in reasonable time by a user. Some others might be simply impossible without computer help. For example, doing a linear regression of values obtained in an experiment, performing a comparison of results obtained by making a sweep in the values of a particular variable or taking a system to an initial state. Hence, it arises the need of encoding some experimental tasks to automatize their execution. With other existing applications, to encode experiments, users need to know how VRLs are implemented. In addition, they have to manage the language in which the simulation was created so they need to handle fluently a simulation language just to perform experiments. The authors propose a tool called the Experiment Editor, to undertake automated experiments for VRLs. The Experiment Editor enables the user to encode experiments regardless of the language in which the laboratory was implemented. To do so, it provides a powerful and easy-to-learn language, and the corresponding interpreter that supports the execution of the experiments.