Skip to content
@practable

Practable

Remote laboratory infrastructure and experiments

Practable logo with three hexagons and tagline: non-traditional practical work

Open-source digital infrastructure and hardware for remote laboratories in education

Contributor Covenant

Why remote laboratories?

Learners require greater access to practical work in order to achieve today's educational goals. Remote laboratories help overcome the resource squeeze and open new opportunities for pedagogical developments.

Why open source?

Learners and facilitators across courses, institutions and countries benefit from each other's rapid and unfettered developments in this exciting field of digital education, without the limitations of proprietary approaches or the risks of vendor lock-in.

Why share?

A shared approach lowers the barrier to entry for everyone, so we can all grow our activities across the widest ranges of budgets and timescales.

What does a remote lab actually look like?

Remote laboratories come in all shapes and sizes. Our first adopters are focusing on form-factors that let them use public spaces on their campuses. The most recent designs are housed in model shipping containers, to represent the hybrid travel that takes place when a learner accesses an experiment. The first generation wooden boxes have a variegated front panel design to represent the blending of online and in-person spaces.

Remote lab experiments in foyer in model containers

Remote lab experiments in wooden boxes in classroom

Examples of remote laboratory experiment installations at UK Higher Education campuses

Example Academic Outputs

Papers

All of the papers below should be openly accessible. If any are not, please just let us know so we can arrange alternative hosting for the affected paper.

Open-source remote laboratory experiments for controls engineering education

Opinion piece: non-traditional practical work for traditional campuses

Post—humanistic 'practices of community' for non-traditional laboratory work (p360-p369)

The future of higher education (HE) hangs on innovating our assessment – but are we ready, willing and able?

Presentations

Selected recent presentations are available here

Adopting

Practable is a community-driven project (see papers above for wide range of authorship) that wants to support your institution in having its own identity, as well as benefiting from resource sharing with others.

The system comprises cloud infrastructure and physical experiments. We can share access to our existing facilities, help you build your own, or even build a bespoke turn-key solution for you with your branding - please get in contact to discuss how we can help. At this time, contracts will be processed through the University of Edinburgh (timothy.drysdale@ed.ac.uk).

A key part of the process is the co-development of technology and pedagogy to suit the unique educational goals of each of your courses. We have existing off-the-shelf designs for hardware and user interfaces, and more on the way, if you need experiments on a shorter time frame.

Contributing

We very much welcome contributions, feature requests, and issues. Our contribution and licensing guidelines are here. The code is changing rapidly as we integrate lessons from two years of high-stakes usage on credit-bearing courses, and will stabilise for the v1 release in due course, so please contact us first before getting started on any contributions (tim@practable.io).

If you use a personal email address for Github, and wish to acknowledge an institutional copyright on your contributions, you can do that here

If you like the idea of remote labs, but are not sure whether it would work for you, we're also keen to hear about what your particular barriers to adoption might be. Perhaps we are already working on a solution not visible here. Feel free to join the discussion and share your perspective with us.

Adopters

University of Edinburgh School of Engineering logo

Funders

University of Edinburgh School of Engineering logo

Please consider supporting the development of STEM education by adopting and/or funding Practable!

Pinned Loading

  1. relay relay Public

    Secure websocket relay server and clients for sharing video, data, and ssh across firewall boundaries

    Go 7 2

  2. bookjs bookjs Public

    Javascript booking client for timdrysdale/relay

    JavaScript 1 1

  3. relay-demojs relay-demojs Public

    Vue.js app for demonstrating handoff from booking system to user interfaces

    TypeScript

  4. penduino penduino Public

    arduino pendulum driver

    C++ 4

Repositories

Showing 10 of 38 repositories
  • static-app-practable-io-ed-dev-ui-sijie Public

    Repo for hosting Sijie's user interfaces in development

    practable/static-app-practable-io-ed-dev-ui-sijie’s past year of commit activity
    HTML 0 AGPL-3.0 0 0 0 Updated Aug 23, 2024
  • static-app-practable-io-ed0-default Public

    Static content: main/default content for the instance ("production" equivalent)

    practable/static-app-practable-io-ed0-default’s past year of commit activity
    JavaScript 0 AGPL-3.0 2 0 0 Updated Aug 21, 2024
  • practable-python Public

    a library for connecting to experiments in python

    practable/practable-python’s past year of commit activity
    Python 0 AGPL-3.0 0 1 0 Updated Aug 20, 2024
  • static-app-practable-io-ed-dev-ui-david Public

    Repo for hosting David's user interfaces in development

    practable/static-app-practable-io-ed-dev-ui-david’s past year of commit activity
    HTML 0 AGPL-3.0 0 0 0 Updated Jul 23, 2024
  • spinner-amax Public

    Spinner experiment with Maxxon AMAX 32 motor

    practable/spinner-amax’s past year of commit activity
    Vue 0 AGPL-3.0 2 5 0 Updated Jul 11, 2024
  • solar-sim Public

    Solar panel simulation from SoE UoE First Year Engineering in 2019

    practable/solar-sim’s past year of commit activity
    JavaScript 0 AGPL-3.0 0 1 0 Updated Jun 10, 2024
  • practable/static-uoe-prod’s past year of commit activity
    JavaScript 0 AGPL-3.0 1 0 0 Updated Jun 10, 2024
  • refrigeration Public

    Refrigeration teaching experiment remote lab

    practable/refrigeration’s past year of commit activity
    C++ 1 GPL-3.0 3 0 0 Updated Jun 5, 2024
  • ripple-tank Public

    Software and documentation for the ripple tank remote lab project

    practable/ripple-tank’s past year of commit activity
    0 AGPL-3.0 0 0 0 Updated May 15, 2024
  • relay Public

    Secure websocket relay server and clients for sharing video, data, and ssh across firewall boundaries

    practable/relay’s past year of commit activity
    Go 7 AGPL-3.0 2 17 0 Updated May 13, 2024

People

This organization has no public members. You must be a member to see who’s a part of this organization.

Most used topics

Loading…