Smart-Lab, LAN Based Application for Effective Lab Supervision

A general problem while coducting lab sessions is inability to correctly assess students´ progress of the taught material. The main reason is that generally the lab layout does not provide access to view every student´s computer screen. Application of science and technology in the field of education can solve this and numerous other issues. For this specific problem, class and lab monitoring systems provide easy control and monitoring facility to teachers for all students´ activities on every computer in the lab. For this purpose a number of classroom management softwares are commercially available in the market these days. Research has shown that the use of such management applications can facilitate teachers and can improve students´ learning. However, such applications are expensive and cannot be customized as source code is not available due to their commercial nature. We have designed an open source and free of cost educational application called Smart-Lab by using simple networking concepts. Smart-Lab provides effective means for carrying out interactive and efficient lab sessions and classroom exercises. The design and preliminary testing of this application is discussed in this paper.