Joint publication on adapting industrial simulations to obtain virtual experiments for learning

Résumé En

The development of online experiments and especially virtual laboratories (i.e. interactive simulation of real equipments) is a complex and resource-consuming process. Their availability is however a prerequisite to any serious learning activities in sciences and engineering. The trend for reducing the implementation overhead for educators is to rely on professional simulation packages on top of which technology-enhanced learning layers are added. The first type of professional simulation packages used in education includes game development engines that provide suitable functionalities for effectively defining scenarios and rendering complex entities. The difficulty in this case is to develop the dynamical model of the scientific or technical objects to be simulated. The second type of professional simulation packages includes professional model libraries targeting at specific application domains. The difficulty here is related to the development of the interactive user interfaces (views). In the framework of the PROLEARN network of excellence, core and associated partners have developed and shared best practices for the development and the implementation of virtual laboratories relying on the EasyJava Simulations framework (http://www.um.es/fem/Ejs/), which is part of the Open Source Physics project. The EasyJava Simulations framework especially facilitates the design of virtual laboratories with highly interactive user interfaces (views). The present document presents a recent extension of this work that takes advantage of the freely available, object-oriented modelling language Modelica that strongly facilitates the reuse of industrial models in educational virtual laboratories, while keeping the benefits of the EasyJava Simulations. It corresponds to a state-of-the-art approach shared by PROLEARN partners. This document is the preprint of an article accepted for publication in the Mathematical and Computer Modelling of Dynamical Systems Journal (copyright Taylor & Francis) that is available online at http://journalsonline.tandf.co.uk/.