An assessment of in-person and remotely operated laboratories

Increasingly mechanical engineering departments are beginning to incorporate remotely operated laboratories into their laboratory curriculums. Yet very few studies exist detailing the extent to which this new medium for laboratory delivery fulfills the educational goals of traditional in-person laboratories. This paper describes a comparison of educational outcomes between in-person and remotely operated laboratories in the mechanical engineering curriculum. The study carried out in the 2001 Fall semester was performed using a remotely operated and an in-person jet thrust laboratory. The laboratories illustrate the fundamentals of compressible fluid mechanics as part of an undergraduate mechanical engineering curriculum. The results from this study indicated no significant difference in the educational outcomes between students who performed the in-person or the remote experiment.