e -Skills for Applied Sciences Labs

Transcription

1 e -Skills for Applied Sciences Labs Constantin Dan Buioca 1, Mariana Buioca 2 (1) University of Petrosani, 2, University Street, 3326 Petrosani, RO (2) Technical College of Vulcan, 43, N. Titulescu Street, 3362 Vulcan, RO dan_buioca@yahoo.com Abstract A non-classical approach of applied sciences labs (physics, chemistry, and engineering) in high schools and universities, involving e-skills for the 21st century, based on market demands, are presented and discussed. Students should have access to both classical and modern type labs, allowing them to choose labs subjects according to their interests in career. Taking into account that each lab has its technical limits, and cannot offer all knowledge and skills asked by labor market, it should offer its own e-labs, but also other e-labs running in other labs. Authors propose a set of basic rules for preparing and running e-labs: how to record labs, process video and pictures files, measure and process data, share labs on internet. Some basic accessible software (Windows Movie Maker, Paint, Screen Calipers, MathCAD) are discussed. Keywords: e-skills, science labs, Windows, MathCAD 1. Introduction According to European Comission (Richier, 21) e-skills definition refers to: e1) ICT practitioner skills (capabilities required for researching, developing, designing, strategic planning, managing, producing, consulting, marketing, selling, integrating, installing, administering, maintaining, supporting and servicing ICT systems; e2) ICT user skills (capabilities required for the effective application of ICT systems and devices by the individual; ICT users apply systems as tools in support of their own work; user skills cover the use of common software tools and of specialised tools supporting business functions within industry; at the general level, they cover digital literacy ); e3) e-business skills (capabilities needed to exploit opportunities provided by ICT, notably the Internet; to ensure more efficient and effective performance of different types of organisations; to explore possibilities for new ways of conducting business/administrative and organizational processes; and/or to establish new businesses. EU Communication on e-skills adopted by the European Commission on 7 September 27 proposed a long-term e-skills agenda and five action lines at EU Level: a1) Longer term cooperation (strengthening cooperation between public authorities and industry, academia, unions and associations through the promotion of multi-stakeholder partnerships and joint initiatives including monitoring supply and demand, anticipating change, adapting curricula, attracting foreign students and highly skilled ICT workers and promoting ICT education in a long-term basis; a2) Human resources investment (ensuring sufficient public and private investments in human resources and e-skills and appropriate financial support and fiscal incentives as well as developing an e-competence framework and tools facilitating mobility, transparency of qualifications and credit transfer between formal, non-formal and industry ICT education);

2 184 University of Bucharest, Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences a3) Attractiveness (promoting science, maths, ICT, role models, job profiles and career perspectives with a particular focus on young people; information campaigns are necessary to provide parents, teachers and pupils, notably girls, with an accurate understanding of opportunities arising from an ICT education and the pursuit of an ICT career); a4) Employability and e-inclusion (developing digital literacy and e-competence actions tailored to the needs of the workforce both in the public and the private sector, with a particular emphasis on SMEs and also to the needs of the unemployed, elderly people, people with low education levels, people with disabilities and marginalized young people); a5) Lifelong acquisition of e-skills (ensuring that workers can regularly update their e-skills and encouraging better and more user-centric ICT enhanced learning and training approaches (elearning); good practices for the training of employees, with a particular emphasis on SMEs, using e-learning should be promoted together with successful solutions and business models. Applied sciences labs are one of the best examples of activities addressing to the all three types of e-skills and fitting to all five action lines presented before. There is a high demand of labs created with ICT practitioners, for ICT users, on a free market with high opportunities provided by Internet. The present work is one of a series (Buioca, 29, 21) referring to a new type of science labs, based on real labs and Internet, better answering to the market demands and to the five action lines presented before. 2. e-labs Based on Real Experiments Physics and engineering sciences labs are remarkable by their strong informative and formative character, allowing students and experimenters to learn and fix new theoretical knowledge and practical skills. That is why, nowadays, the presence of the experimenter in the lab is considered mandatory, also conditioned by the classic way of running a lab activity. A brief analysis of national and international lab offer reveals several trends, presented below. t1) There is a strong trend to optimize the lab activity, by: reducing number of technical staff, decreasing the number of lab hours per discipline, increasing the number of students participating to a lab, increasing the number of parallel lab works. Under the circumstances, it is difficult to maintain the high informative and formative standard of such an activity, possible only by providing more detailed tutorials and increasing the amount of time for lab preparation and study. t2) There is a very rich and diversified offer of so called e-labs on-line, that are mostly simulations of physical phenomena or engineering applications. Two major trends are to be found here: a) simulations using e-learning specialized platforms, in which modeling equations are not visible, but allowing users to input some data and see the results on the studied phenomenon; b) modeling/simulations using specialized software, allowing users to see the equations governing the studied phenomenon, input some data and see the effects. t3) There is a poor offer of video files with front-records, cvasi-static, regarding experiments and lab works, in which the experimenter is presented in a large frame, from one recording angle, doing the experiment; the user can see and follow the experiment but cannot participate to or measure any physical parameter. Each of these trends has their advantages and disadvantages. This work proposes a new approach, combining the advantages: possibility to conceive classic lab tutorials in electronic format, modeling and simulation of the studied phenomena using accessible software and use of labs video records from the view angle of the experimenter, allowing users to observe, measure and process experimental data as they were in the lab. 3. e-skills for Video Records Next basic principles for achieving video records were fallowed (Buioca, 29).

3 The 8 th International Conference on Virtual Learning ICVL v1) Video records are achieved from the view angle of experimenter, allowing users to follow the experiment as they were in the lab, replacing the experimenter. v2) Experiments are performed by two experimenters, one experienced (doing the record), the other less experienced, as a usual student (doing the technical operations). The number of two experimenters is the optimal one, allowing discussions and collaboration in order to increase the experiment s quality. v3) Both experimenters comment permanently the technical operations, measurement results, observations, providing audio information very useful to the user. This last one will be therefore able to better understand the technical operations, measurement results, and have his conclusions. The user can stop and play the record, read his results and compare with the ones obtained by the experimenters. v4) The video file format depends on the desired measurements accuracy. Usual and accessible camcorders allow HD or Full HD records (up to pixels, up to 6 2 fps), giving good accuracy in determination of coordinates and time. Higher accuracy can be obtained by using more expensive camcorders, specialized software for image interpolation or by data processing. v5) If offered on-line, for international users, the video record can be completed with some audio files or subtitles in different languages. 4. e-skills for Video File Processing The video file must be downloaded on a PC and processed, for reason of maximum accessibility, using typical Windows software (Windows Movie Maker for download and processing video files, Windows Media Player for playing, Paint for still pictures processing). You will find a lot of tutorials for Windows Movie Maker. Unfortunately, they are all written by IT specialists for general purpose. What we are presenting here are some tips coming from experience and useful for scientific purpose. A typical Windows Movie Maker dialog box is shown in figure 1. One can see a typical Windows Office main menu (File, Edit, View, etc.) and a display frame with typical commands (Play, Stop, Frame by frame, Split the clip, Take a picture, Time counter). Figure 1. Movie Maker dialog box

4 186 University of Bucharest, Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences Once you start your Windows Movie Maker program, you must first import your video file (click on File, then Import into Collections). Now you are ready to play your record. Here are some tips for obtaining best accuracy measurements. - You can Pause and then Split the clip, thus removing unnecessary actions in your clip. - Then you can play again your record, using Frame by frame facility. - Once you obtain a useful frame, push the Take a picture button. The picture will be available for further data processing, at the same display accuracy as the video file, allowing the obtaining of distances, angles and moments of time. - You can read the frame s time below-right the displayed frame, taking into account that, actually, two superposed frames are displayed. For example, if you have 25 fps, the time step should be.4 seconds and what you get is.8 seconds. If you have objects moving, you will see the objects in different positions, corresponding to the two superposed frames, as shown in figure 2. Figure 2. A free falling object at different moments; columns correspond to moments from to.4s, step.8s - Save the final video file and open it again with Windows Media Player (or any other similar program). You will be able now to stop/pause/play the movie, measure/read your data for different frames, analyze your experiment, etc. - You can now increase your measurements accuracy by open in Paint (or any other similar program) each saved picture, zoom it up to pixel level and measure/read again your data. Figure 3 shows an example. Figure 3. Measuring/reading data in an optics experiment, at different zooms; while the initial reading is 1,the final one is 1.8 (zoom 4%)

5 The 8 th International Conference on Virtual Learning ICVL You can also increase your measurements accuracy by using a Screen Ruler or a Screen Caliper (for example, as shown in figure 4. They both relate pixel dimension to distance between two points on your picture. 5. e-skills for Data Processing You can find a lot of programs for data processing, starting from the simple ones, like Microsoft Office Excel, to the advanced programming one, like Mathematica ( We strongly recommend MathCAD ( an user-friendly program with a simple programming language (very close to the mathematical language) accessible to both practitioners and users. Although you can find very good tutorials for MathCAD, for science labs you don t need to know all the facilities offered by this program. Our experience shows that a minimum knowledge is required, as shown below, for a real situation of a uniformly accelerated linear motion described by the Figure 4. Screen Ruler and Screen Caliper 2 equation x ( t) t 2t 3(Buioca, 21). The MathCAD program for processing experimental data is presented below, with comments (text mode) in italics. te xe Two vectors te and xe are defined and the experimental data, characterized by a relative errors under 1%, are introduced as vector elements. t 1 9 A time row is defined, having values from to 9 (seconds), with step 1 (second). These values can be considered those determined with perfect accuracy (% relative errors). x( t) t 2 2 t 3 A function x(t) is defined, giving the values (in meters) determined with perfect accuracy (% relative errors) The typical data interpolation block, based on cubic spline interpolation, is: xs1 cspline ( te xe) xs2 pspline( te xe) xs3 lspline( te xe) m slope( te xe) b intercept ( te xe) xregress regress ( te xe 2) xloess loess ( te xe 1)

6 188 University of Bucharest, Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences u u 1 z u 2 z 2 F( z u) 1 z z 2 vg P genfit ( te xe vg F) g( r) F( r P) i 1 9 r The graphic is: xe i 8 g( r) x( t) te r t i Data Best fitting curve Theoretical Figure 5. Typical graphic obtained by data processing with MathCAD One can see that the best fitting curve (obtained by data interpolation) is very close to the theoretical one and clearly removes most of experimental data errors.

7 The 8 th International Conference on Virtual Learning ICVL Conclusions Basic e-skills required by modern applied sciences labs are discussed, based on our past years experience. Both practitioners and users should know how to record an experiment, process the video and picture files, measure/read data from files, and process data with specialized software. Our experiments with students from high school and university levels showed that these e-skills can be achieved in a dozen hours of lectures and seminary. 7. References Buioca, C.D., Interpolation of experimental data with MathCAD, Annals of the Constantin Brancusi University of Tg. Jiu, Eng. Series, 2/29, Buioca, C.D., PhysCAMP, a Computer Aided Modeling Platform for Physics, Proceedings of International Conference ELSE29, Bucharest, Romania, 29 ( Buioca, C.D., Real-like lab on-line basic principles and case study for light refraction, Annals of the Constantin Brancusi University of Tg. Jiu, Eng. Series, 2/29, Buioca, C.D., Increasing Measurements Accuracy in Mechanical Experiments by Using MathCAD Data Interpolation, Annals of University of Petrosani, Mechanical Engineering Series, 12/21, Richier, A, e-skils for the 21 st century, 21, EU Communication on e-skills, Adopted by the European Commission on 7 September 27, sectors/ict/e-skills/ index_en.htm (Physics Labs on-line). (Physics Labs). (Physics Simulations with Java). (Mathematica)