The increasing popularity of distance education poses exciting new challenges. In particular, current pedagogical paradigms, such as competency-based education, require students’ continuous evaluation. That is, to master skills, students need to receive constant feedback to guide their experimentation processes. However, teaching teams are usually under-dimensioned to support the large number of students that online courses usually have. This paper presents the approach we have adopted at the National University of Distance Education to overcome this problem for the case of computer programming practices, which complements human evaluation with an automatic assessment system. The paper describes our system and reports its benefits with an empirical study from 2011 to 2018 that involved 14,944 students.

Inquiry-based learning is a pedagogical approach where students are motivated to pose their own questions when facing problems or scenarios. In physics learning, students are turned into scientists who carry out experiments, collect and analyze data, formulate and evaluate hypotheses, and so on. Lab experimentation is essential for inquiry-based learning, yet there is a drawback with traditional hands-on labs in the high costs associated with equipment, space, and maintenance staff. Virtual laboratories are helpful to reduce these costs. This paper enriches the virtual lab ecosystem by providing an integrated environment to automate experimentation tasks. In particular, our environment supports: (i) scripting and running experiments on virtual labs, and (ii) collecting and analyzing data from the experiments. The current implementation of our environment supports virtual labs created with the authoring tool Easy Java/Javascript Simulations. Since there are public repositories with hundreds of freely available labs created with this tool, the potential applicability to our environment is considerable.

Personal assistants and social robotics have evolved significantly in recent years thanks to the development of artificial intelligence and affective computing. Today’s main challenge is achieving a more natural and human interaction with these systems. Integrating emotional models into social robotics is necessary to accomplish this goal. This paper presents an emotional model whose design has been supervised by psychologists, and its implementation on a social robot. Based on social psychology, this dimensional model has six dimensions with twelve emotions. Fuzzy logic has been selected for defining: (i) how the input stimuli affect the emotions and (ii) how the emotions affect the responses generated by the robot. The most significant contribution of this work is that the proposed methodology, which allows engineers to easily adapt the robot personality designed by a team of psychologists. It also allows expert psychologists to define the rules that relate the inputs and outputs to the emotions, even without technical knowledge. This methodology has been developed and validated on a personal assistant robot. It consists of three input stimuli, (i) the battery level, (ii) the brightness of the room, and (iii) the touch of caresses. In a simplified implementation of the general model, these inputs affect two emotions that generate an externalized emotional response through the robot’s heartbeat, facial expression, and tail movement. The three experiments performed verify the correct functioning of the emotional model developed, demonstrating that stimuli, independently or jointly, generate changes in emotions that, in turn, affect the robot’s responses.

We present a remotely controlled experiment in which liquid droplets are levitated by a vertically aligned focused laser beam. The droplets levitate at the point where the photon pressure of the focused laser beam balances the gravitational force. The size of a trapped droplet can be measured by detecting the diffraction pattern created by the trapping laser light. The charge on the trapped droplet can thereafter be determined by observing its motion when a vertically directed electrical field is applied. This experiment allows a student to study many fundamental physics processes, such as photon pressure, diffraction of light, or the motion of charged particles in electrical fields. The complexity of the experiments and the concept studied make this suitable for advanced studies in physics. The laser power required in the experiment is about 1 W, which is a thousand times greater than the value of 1 mW at which lasers begin to be capable of causing harm to eyes; high voltages are also used. Further, the cost of the equipment is relatively high, which limits its availability to most undergraduate teaching laboratories. It thus constitutes an ideal experiment for remote control.