Enhancing Students’ Learning Experience via Low-Cost Network Laboratories

Abstract

This paper presents low-cost laboratory which has been designed and developed to enhance learning experience and help students gain skills and knowledge in the field of distributed systems. In order to build a comprehensive distributed file system, we used the laboratory consisted of 40 card-sized Raspberry Pi devices, with the accent on stability, scalability, and its low-cost. Aiming to assess the impact of this new learning environment on the learning process and its outcomes, we surveyed students following the completion of three project stages during the 17 laboratory exercises in one academic year, assuring that we maintained the same subjects of study during the experiments. Supported by interesting answers on various set of questions, we provide a valuable insight into students' experience, obstacles and observations during system's implementation. This particular insight paves the way toward: 1. further laboratory's improvement, 2. adopting this approach in other courses related to ours, 3. encouraging teachers to embrace similar practice regardless of type of education field.

Cloud-based virtual labs vs. low-cost physical labs: what engineering students think

“…To this end, our educational research includes the design and development of two different types of laboratories, i.e., a low-cost RPi-based laboratory, and a laboratory in the cloud, for the practical teaching of the course Distributed systems. Firstly, we presented a low-cost laboratory based on RPi devices in [4], to improve students' experience of learning distributed systems. Secondly, we leveraged on the virtualization techniques (i.e., containerization) to create a scalable environment for remote experimentation, and development of distributed systems.…”

“…2, the laboratory consists of 50 RPis that are provided to the students during all 17 laboratory exercises, thereby creating a homogeneous set of five devices for each group. In parallel to the teaching process, we collected a thorough feedback from our students, asking a various set of questions that allowed us to assess the impact of this new learning environment on the learning process and its outcomes [4]. Therefore, we presented our interesting findings about students' experience with work in this low-cost laboratory in [4].…”

“…In parallel to the teaching process, we collected a thorough feedback from our students, asking a various set of questions that allowed us to assess the impact of this new learning environment on the learning process and its outcomes [4]. Therefore, we presented our interesting findings about students' experience with work in this low-cost laboratory in [4].…”

“…The low-cost RPi-based laboratory solutions as a testbed platform for both hardware and software system exploration, provide a great potential for bringing the learnt concepts into practice [9]. In our previous work [4], we studied the state of the art concepts of involving RPi technology into STEM curriculum [9][10][11][12][13], thereby designing and building our own solution for a low-cost networking laboratory within confines of the undergraduate course Distributed Systems. As a result of this research, we acknowledged that RPi laboratory set-up can be successfully used for a hands-on laboratory approach.…”

Reacting to COVID-19 campus imminent closure: Enabling remote networking laboratories via MOOCs

“…Regarding the project work, students' main task is to build a distributed file sharing system among nodes that are organized in a circular topology. Before the lockdown, students were supposed to develop such distributed system by using Raspberry Pis (RPis) [8]. However, such circumstances implied the need for shifting the whole laboratory to the cloud, thus, instead of utilizing RPis students were instructed to use virtualized environment in the form of Docker containers.…”