The three year endeavour saw Hasselink and two grad students building, calibrating, and recording the data of a shoebox sized diffraction experiment prototype and their more complicated nano-conveyor belt.
The nano-conveyor belt is designed to manipulate nanoparticles on an individual level. It is about the size of a pool table and houses various equipment including mirrors, lasers, computers and even microscopes. Needless to say, experiments of this scale have a large price tag associated with it.
Hesselink believes that "if you're going to earn a science or engineering degree in a MOOC, I think that you will need to fulfill some sort of lab requirement… This could be a very effective way to share expensive and complicated laboratories with the masses to meet that requirement."
The initial incarnation of iLabs, which started as early as 1996, included remote control of the actual lab equipment and scheduling. This system then moved to the Internet where the lab could be performed anywhere in the world though distance education. The cost of maintaining the lab was mitigated by keeping the set up small, no bigger than a shoe box or two.
However the introduction of massive open online courses, and other larger online education classes, has made the scheduling of the actual lab impossible. With 100 000 students, even short 15 minutes labs sessions would need over 1040 days to give everyone a kick at the can. However, increasing the number of these “labs in the box” would cut into the cost. The solution Hasselink found was to record the results.
To record the results, automation was key. A program was set up to test, record the video, and record the results of every possible set up. The concept was tested on a diffraction experiment prototype. With LabVIEW and a few hours, hundreds of experiments based on different initial conditions are automated and recorded.
To scale the prototype to the aforementioned nano-conveyor belt required little modifications even through the experiment wasn’t designed with digital modification in mind.
It is this database that students then access online, producing the same results as if the experiment were performed by the actual user. Only with this set-up, the results are pre-recorded and the lab requires no maintenance.
The concept doesn’t have to end at online education. Hasselink notes that this may be a great method to record PhD candidate experiments, and suggests commercial applications in the medical, engineering, and science world. Imagine manipulating the lab setup of the journal publication you are reading.
Though the concept of digital experiments is not new (computer dissection of frogs were used at high schools for years) the implementation has always been a little too digital and clunky. They would often involve artificial results visualized on an artificial 3D representation. However, with iLabs, Hasselink gives you control over the real deal.
Hands-on experience will always outweigh digital experience. But the potential here is to expand scientific knowledge to the world and those unable to afford laboratory equipment. One thing is for sure, it will cut down on accidents brought on by those ignoring their WHMIS Training.
Source: Stanford News