A Wifi Virtual Laboratory

The Internet lies at the heart of today’s social, educational and business worlds. Computer networking technology has hitherto provided the infrastructure to facilitate inter-personal pan-global communication on an unprecedented scale. The next logical development for such communicative pathways is the extension of access to this global mesh from individual static workstations to a multiplicity of mobile agents. Convenience of access will be greatly increased by the use of such agents, underpinned in turn by wireless network technology. The WiFi Virtual Laboratory project seeks to enhance our learning and teaching of such technology. This paper describes the educational goals of the project, the technological requirements implied by those goals, the architecture developed to satisfy these goals, observations made during preliminary evaluations, and plans for future development.