Today, there are a multitude of initiatives that favor the learning of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) and educational robotics (ER). Thanks to the available means, it is very easy to access a wide variety of tools based on programmable hardware. Although there are many options, most of them either require a high economic investment or require a great deal of time for the development of educational activities. Through the results shown in this paper, the great potential of Scratch as a solution for students who are just starting out in the knowledge related to STEM and ER is shown. To show the usefulness of Scratch a course has been designed, which dedicates three modules to the use of Scratch. The three modules have different levels of difficulty for the students, a basic level of difficulty, another intermediate level of difficulty and a last module with an advanced degree of difficulty.

New social learning demands are fostered by continuous learning culture and self-learning environments. This demanding scenario requires ubiquitous educational environments without temporal restrictions. For these reasons, educational institutions increasingly rely on remote laboratories (RLs) as educational tools in order to provide real-world experiences in science education. RLs present several advantages to students which have been widely reported. Although quite powerful, RLs have intrinsically some drawbacks. While some of these drawbacks are inherent to the remote interaction and cannot be addressed, such as the impossibility to provide manual skill, many others derive from technical constraints. Traditionally, the approach to deal with these limitations on the performance is based on the redesign and improvement of the RL. However, due to the number of operating systems, an alternative approach is open for a RL: Virtual Instruments System in Reality (VISIR). VISIR is a RL designed to construct and test electrical/electronic circuits. The possibility of building a federation of VISIR nodes emerged from the actual needs detected by the VISIR community. In this paper, we describe a federation of VISIR nodes reporting the architecture implemented for the federation and the integration of the resulting federated resources into the different learning environments provided by the institutions to their students.

This paper shows the development of two new experimental exercises that are at the top of the state-of-the-art platforms for setting up, wiring, and measuring electronic circuits online, virtual instrument systems in reality (VISIR), allowing: 1) non-isolated linear regulated dc/dc converter and 2) non-isolated switching-regulated dc/dc converter. Those experiments are part of a new setup in the VISIR oriented to master as well as experienced students and users that would like to increase their experience in industrial electronics and power components management. The development of the two experiments is explained along with the necessary configuration to the core-platform VISIR. This is preceded by a brief overview of VISIR, including its hardware and software components. Finally, the remote experimental results obtained are presented.

The aim of this paper is to introduce the use of Crumble, an emerging tool, to guide the introduction to educational robotics as the second step in introducing students to robotics. Robotics requires various skills such as systems thinking, programming mentality, active learning, mathematics, science, judgment and decision making, good communication, technological design, complex problem solving and persistence. These skills can be easily developed using Crumble. The results of the educational robotics course demonstrate how children with previous Scratch programming experience, but no physical robot experience can continue the learning process through classroom experiences. The result of this work shows that it is better to adapt the difficulty to each of the children. Finally, it is important to combine theory and practice in order to include fun tasks intertwined with the challenges of applying theory to problem solving.

For educational institutions in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) areas, the provision of practical learning scenarios is, traditionally, a major concern. In the 21st century, the explosion of information and communication technology (ICTs), as well as the universalization of low-cost hardware, has allowed the proliferation of technical solutions for any field, in the case of experimentation, encouraging the emergence and proliferation of nontraditional experimentation platforms. This movement has resulted in enriched practical environments, with wider adaptability for both students and teachers. In this article, the evolution of scholar production has been analyzed at the global level from 2000 to 2020. Current and emerging experimentation scenarios have been identified, specifying the scope and boundaries between them.

A Federation of Remote Laboratory OERs: Grid of VISIR systems through PILAR Project