One Day Workshop on "VIRTUAL LABS"
8th December 2023
Institution’s Innovation Council (IIC), Ministry of Education (MoE), Dronacharya Group of Institutions, Greater Noida conducted one-day workshop on “Virtual Labs” on 8th December 2023 in association with IIT Delhi. 9 faculty members along with 67 students of CSE and ECS Department attended the workshop. Mr. Chandan Kumar (Sr. Field Engineer), Mr. Gautam Sharma (Field Engineer), Mr. Jassi Prasad (Field Engineer) were the resource persons from IIT Delhi.
Virtual Labs is an initiative of Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD), Govt of India (GOI) under the National mission on Education through ICT (NMEICT). Three following experts of Virtual Lab from IIT Delhi participated and conducted the session.
Mr. Chandan Kumar (Sr. Field Engineer) briefed the gathering about Virtual Labs. He introduced the features and usefulness of Virtual Labs. He told the basic purpose of Vlab is to enhance the knowledge of students by providing the remote-access to labs in various disciplines of Science and Engineering. These labs also share the costly equipment and resources, which are otherwise available to limited number of users due to constraints of cost and geographical distances. Virtual Labs would be made more effective and realistic by providing additional inputs to the students like accompanying audio and video streaming of an actual lab experiment and equipment. Remotely triggering an experiment in an actual lab and providing students the result of the experiment through the computer interface would entail carrying out the actual lab experiment. Internet-based experimentation further permits use of resources – knowledge, software, and data available on the web, apart from encouraging experiments being simultaneously performed by multiple users separated geographically.
Mr. Gautam Sharma, (Field Engineer) stated, today most equipment has a computer interface for control and data storage. So, it is possible to design good experiments around some of this equipment which would enhance the learning of students. He explained about the VLab portal, its important features and accesses of various labs developed by different participating institutes. These Virtual Labs cater to students at the undergraduate level, post graduate level as well as to research scholars. The session was very interactive and students enjoyed while learning concepts of the labs.
Hands On Practice in Labs
Students were allowed to do hands-on practice on the Virtual Lab Portal under the supervision of Mr. Jassi Prasad. Students were divided into 2 computer labs, where they performed experiments on Problem Solving Lab, Python programing Lab, Data Base Management System.
The students were able to perform at least two experiments on their own in each lab with the guidance of DGI faculty and Virtual Lab experts.