Building virtual educational environment

Nowadays, when there are more students in teaching groups than before, new problems may appear in learning processes. One of these is how to teach automation programming to 40 students if there is only one machine available for testing the programs. As a solution for this challenge we use simulation and virtualization, depending of the definition. The main idea in our solution is to build up a machine – usually a miniature model test it and create a simulation model (i.e. virtual model) of it. This forms learning and testing environment for the students. In HAMK University of Applied Sciences we developed and accomplished this kind of learning environment in a project with one of our partnership universities, Technical University of Cluj Napoca. The project was called “Parking Lot”. It is a servo controlled small-scale educational machine which moves small cars to parking lots. With this machine a student can learn logic and servo programming in safest and fastest way, using a simulated environment. With this kind of combinations of real and virtual environments we can offer the students new kinds of experiences and challenging learning tasks which in addition to giving better learning results also seem to be very rewarding to the students.