Remote experiment
A remote experiment is a real experiment with real laboratory instruments and equipment that can be controlled by a teacher or a student or any user from their computer through the Internet autonomously, or without the need for a human intermediary.
Remotely controlled experiments have become a widespread tool for teaching physics at the university level of education. The use of a remote experiment is most beneficial and helpful in the domains where it is impossible to demonstrate the real experiment or where there is no appropriate equipment available.
Advantages of remote experiments
We can divide the physical experiments into three fundamental groups.
- The first group consists of real experiments conducted in the traditional ("face to face") school laboratories. Working in the classical school laboratories provides a direct contact with real measure equipment and offers an immediate feedback of the teacher or the classmates.
- The second category of physical experiment comprises virtual experiments conducted in virtual laboratories. Students do not work with real laboratory tools in these laboratories, they only control virtual objects.
- The third group represents the real experiments that can be on-line controlled by users via the Internet. A remotely controlled experiment or in short a remote experiment is used as a nomenclature for these kinds of experiments.
Remotely controlled experiments have several benefits different from simulations in virtual laboratories and from classical experiments in the traditional school laboratories:
- carrying out experiments from anywhere in the world;
- no time restriction;
- experiment is permanently ready for measurement;
- no danger of injury for the experimenter;
- unique results for the particular place of measurement.
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