Engineering education: When lab work can be done remotely, virtually too

In early 2024, the National Institute of Technology, Karnataka, witnessed many students eagerly waiting to do a laboratory experiment. “The remote trigger laboratory has been here for many years, but this time,we wanted to cut the whole set-up cost from lakhs to a few thousand,” says Vincent Paul, a Mechanical Engineering graduate from NIT-K. Mr. Paul has played a prominent role in developing the RT Lab as part of his final year project. From the simulated virtual laboratory, Mr. Paul moved on to developing a Remote Trigger laboratory where one can use their computer to trigger the lab apparatus from a distance. Flexible hours, distance Prof. Gangadharan’s pitch for the virtual lab has always been the same: “a lab at your place, pace, and period,” says the head of the Centre for System Design at NIT-K. According to him, the team demonstrated their work in the virtual lab, and the government was impressed, and NIT-K was included in the main implementation phase.“Our speciality is that we are still running the remote trigger experiments, which is a kind of a virtual lab,” Prof. Gangadharan says.