Anytime, Everywhere - Approaches to Distance Labs in Embedded Systems Education

Embedded systems education is a vital part of the computer engineering curriculum. Increasing numbers of students stress our lab capacities, time constraints encumber working students whereas handicapped students often have difficulties attending the lab. Our project "Seamless Campus: Distance Labs" introduces remote-teaching into our hardware-centered courses. These courses are slightly different from other programming courses that focus on the development of typical application software where setting up a development environment on the students PCs is a relatively easy task. With this paper we investigate the additional requirements that arise for different types of embedded system labs. We examine three possible concepts for implementing distance labs. A crucial aspect for the acceptance of remote labs is that as much as possible of the "feeling" of the on-site workplace is retained with the remote workplace setup. Therefore we give a guideline how the "hands-on" aspect of hardware-centered courses can be retained with remote labs