DE SOUZA, Antonio Lopes 1, SALGADO, Luiz Antonio 2, SOLLERO, Maria Karla V.3, & SUEMITSU, Walter Issamu4
All authors are with the Department of Electrical Engineering at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, UFRJ, http://www.dee.ufrj.br
1 lopes@dee.ufrj.br, 2 lasalgado@rionet.com.br, 3 karla@dee.ufrj.br, 4 walter@dee.ufrj.br
Abstract: The effects of the accelerated development of the new information technologies can be felt in almost every aspect our professional life. In some areas, as it is the case of engineering, the changes have been dramatic and this is leading a growing number of professionals into some sort of knowledge updating. The educators in the area of engineering are also becoming aware of that demand and this is motivating them into the search for methodologies to optimise the use of the new information technologies in education. This paper presents a project under development at the Department of Electrical Power Engineering of The Federal University of Rio de Janeiro aiming at the production of resources based on the use of the new communication and information technologies in the teaching and learning processes.
Keywords: Internet, VRML, and multimedia
The new Information Technologies are permeating every aspect of our daily life, and are provoking profound impact on virtually all organisations and citizens. They have emerged from the integration of a set of previously separated technologies and include computers, communication, software, databases, networking and peripheral devices. They are present in business, communication and entertainment but it is in the area of education where the information technology effects are believed to be stronger because they are expanding the learning opportunities for a growing number of citizens.
Despite of bringing widely acknowledged benefits the information technologies are also posing challenges to the society. They are clearly contributing for the construction of a more integrated and, perhaps, more human society, but are requiring better-educated citizens. A computerised society needs citizens prepared to work with aspects of the technology that in the early days were only attributes of a restrict group of people. Students leaving the university courses nowadays are expected to have some degree of familiarisation with the use of the information technologies. This expectancy is transformed in exigency when it comes to those courses relying on the use of computational tools; such is the case of engineering. If the universities and the educators ignore these exigencies they will fatally be forming people unable to live in the modern society.
It is consensus among the educators that a very efficient way to prepare people to face the challenges imposed by the arrival of the information technology is by using the resources of the information technology itself. Among these resources there is one powerful teaching and learning tool: The Internet. It was reflecting on the possibilities of using the Internet to obtain, produce, and disseminate information that a group of lecturers from the Department of Electrical Power Engineering at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro devised the LANTEG PROJECT. The project looks for the production of didactic multimedia resources and the construction of strategies to optimise the use of the Internet and the information Technology resources in the teaching and learning of Electrical Power Engineering.
The project LANTEG is centralised in a web site composed by ten interrelated areas whose structure and opening page are shown in Figures 1 and Figure 2, respectively. The web was chosen because it satisfies the needs for storage and dissemination, allowing us to make the produced material easily available to other people and institutions.
Our first design approach was the production of a set of closed educational modules directly linked to the disciplines that constitute the standard Electric Engineering curriculum in Brazil (the standard curriculum, as defined by the Brazilian Ministry of Education). This approach, which we call ”by course approach” after McCalley et al [1], was abandoned due to the considerable curricula variations from institution to institution which would seriously restrict the use of the produced material. Another approach, finally adopted, was the production ”by subject” where the material is being created according to a set of selected basic topics. In this case we would leave to the user the freedom to associate the material according to his/her requirements. These could vary, for example, from somebody teaching the basic theory of the Electrical Machines, to that of an eventual web navigator looking for some sort of self-education in a very specific subject, like the ”magnetic behaviour of materials” for example. The produced material is composed by basic texts, sets of laboratory experiments assembled in virtual environments (virtual laboratories), sets of visual teaching tools including slide sequences, graphics and tables, sets of virtual reality recreations of potentially dangerous environments like an electric substation, sets of virtually guided technical tours like a visit to hydroelectric power plant, sets of Java simulations and 3D (VRML) modelling and visualisation, and information concerning the history and evolution of the science of electrical engineering. This material can be consulted (and used) in the different areas of the project site which are described shortly in the next paragraphs.
Virtual Museum: this area is divided into two main sections, a permanent exposure sector and a periodically changing sector. The permanent sector shows the illustrated history of the Electrical Engineering in Brazil and a virtual gallery with photographs and short biographies of scientists whose work has contributed to the development of this area. The periodically changing sector is devoted to virtual exhibitions and short time displays. The Museum area has also a collection of links to other virtual science museums around the world. A sub-project is also being developed in the Museum area aiming at producing a three-dimension Virtual reality display of the electrical engineering scientific evolution. It is better detailed in the next chapter.
Virtual Tours: this area shows virtual visits to places where practical aspects of the Electrical Engineering could be learned by visualisation. Several techniques and resources are being used here. They can vary, for example, from a multimedia sequence of slides in the Microsoft Power Point showing a visit to a thermonuclear plant, to a tour in virtual reality (VRML) to an electrical substation with the possibilities of the navigation, immersion and interaction with the environment.
Visual Archive: this area is a visual database containing photos, videos, animations, drawings, tables, graphics, and Virtual Reality images related to the theme of Electrical Power Engineering. This archive is also the repository of a collection of VRML and JAVA modelling and visualisations of electrical machines and devices
Virtual Laboratory: sequences of virtual experiences involving fundamental concepts of Electric Engineering are available in this area. The virtual experiences are being created with the use of the languages VRML (the language of the virtual reality adapted for the Internet), Java, and HTML. There is also a collection of links pointing to other related virtual laboratories around the world.
Virtual Library and Tutorials: this area is used to the storage and publication of electronic books, general texts, scientific papers and tutorials on different aspects of Electrical Power Engineering. Links pointing to related virtual libraries on the web are also available.
Virtual Classroom: this is a strategy defined to organise and optimise the use of information on Electrical Power Engineering available at the web. Hypertexts with suggested sequences of links are accessible to the visitor. These links should be visited following a sequence based on the crescent degree of complexity of their approach. These strategy aims at the gradual accumulation of the knowledge needed to the understanding of the chosen subject of study. At the end of the guided visit evaluation questionnaires are available.
Energy and Alternative Sources: This area is intended to offer the visitor the opportunity to review the available technologies for electrical energy generation, from the classical hydroelectric and thermal plants to alternative sources, renewable or not, as wind generators, solar cells, biomass, fuel cells and so on. The main objective is to provide a perspective on pros and cons of each technology, the power potential, impact on the environment, local availability, etc.
Energy Efficiency: In this area it is possible to share our concerns on the need to reduce global energy generation through the use of more efficient consumer devices. The visitor will find information on new technologies available in this field, statistics relative to energy consumption, perspectives for the future and other related material.
New technologies in Education: this area is designated to be a place where the visitor could find or disseminate up-to-date information on the uses of the new technologies in education. It is designated to be the site of an on-line journal in Portuguese language on the same subject. A collection of links on electrical engineering education issues is also available here.
Department Staff Homepages: area designated to host the addresses of the department staff homepages.
The LANTEG Project is still in its first year of execution but a considerable amount of educational material has already been produced and will soon be made available on-line. Tutorials on various aspects of the Electrical Power Engineering have been written, a set of Microsoft Power Point slide sequences presenting a broad panorama of the processes of electric power generation in Brazil have been produced. Also, several modelling and visualisation sub-projects based on the use of VRML (the Virtual Reality Modelling Language) are under development. Some of these projects are detailed in the following paragraphs.
A Virtual History of Electric Engineering. This is a sub-project under development in the Virtual Museum area and aims at the production of a three-dimensional interactive display of the first decades of evolution of the electric engineering via the virtual reality reconstruction of the first machines and experiments. Some of these machines can be found on exhibition at museums of science and technology around the world but because of their historical value the access to them is very restricted. The use of the virtual reality resources allows us to overcome some of the restriction because this technique permits a detailed three-dimensional reconstruction of the original model. This reconstruction can be handled and functional details, which could not be fully appreciated in a photograph or even in a distant display, can be observed and understood. The use of the virtual reality brings the possibility of a closer and interactive contact with these rare machines to a large number of people. In its first phase the project aims at the reconstruction of a sequence of electrostatic machines. Figures 3,4, 5, and 6 show four of these reconstructions. They are, respectively, the Bonetti machine, the Ramsden machine, The Voss machine and the Holtz machine. All reconstructions are animated to show details of their operation. The project is extensive and its results will be continually displayed in the site of the LANTEG project and through a series of papers being written
Electrical Machines Virtual Laboratory: The Electromechanical Conversion of Energy is an essential part of the Electrical Engineering graduation program. It is a common belief among the students that it is possible to understand the operation of an electrical motor just by watching its operation. They are not able however; to correlate the several aspects and physical laws involved in the process. Even though the mathematical understanding of the physical laws is essential, the lack of visualisation of the phenomena sometimes turns the physical concepts too abstract.
The objective of this Virtual Laboratory experiment is to give to the student the necessary pedagogic support for the experimental part of this matter.
Usually the electrical machines (transformers, motors and generators) at a real laboratory are available as a closed pack. The constructional details are not always easily accessible and the students are not often given the opportunity to test some of the basic principles behind the operation of these machines. A Virtual Reality interactive laboratory can overcome these limitations by allowing the student to handle basic models, which have been especially designed to emphasise the visualisation of constructional and functional concepts.
Figures 8.a, 8.b, 8.c, and 8.d show a simple three-dimension VRML model of an elementary alternate current generator. This model allows the visualisation of field lines and the direction of the force on the coil. Through the side panel buttons it is possible to obtain the voltage waveform and change parameters, like the speed, and the machine characteristics, as the number of turns and pole shapes.
Virtual Tours: The material used to illustrate this area comes from of a project under development in the area of Virtual Tours aiming at producing a three-dimensional virtual reality panorama of the alternative energy sources. Figures 9.a, 9.b, 9.c, and 9.d show several views taken at the VRML environment for Eolic energy farms. This environment is a navigable virtual field of eolic energy generators. The visitor can navigate, interact with the environment to see constructional details of the eolic generators, and also, through the activation of links, obtain additional textual and visual information on the whole process of eolic energy generation. There are also links to material on the same subject available in other areas of the LANTEG project.
This paper has presented a project of an Internet-based environment for support teaching and learning of electrical engineering at the Department of Electrical Engineering of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. The work done until now has demonstrated the feasibility of this project and its importance for the creation of an optimal learning environment. The project is still at the beginning and so we don’t have a consistent feedback from the students, but it’s our aim to submit all the produced material to the student’s evaluation.
This project is intended to show some possibilities of using Internet efficiently for the enhancement of the teaching and learning processes.
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Figure 2. Site Opening |
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Figure 3. Bonetti Machine |
Figure 4. Ramsden Machine |
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Figure 5. Voss Machine |
Figure 6. Holtz Machine |
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Figure 8a. Virtual Laboratory |
Figure 8b. Virtual Laboratory |
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Figure 8c. Virtual Laboratory |
Figure 8d. Virtual laboratory |
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Figure 9a Eolic Energy |
Figure 9b Eolic Energy |
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Figure 9c Eolic Energy |
Figure 9d Eolic Energy |
[1] MCCALLEY, James D., AJJARAPU V., DE LA REE, Jaime, PHADKE, Arun G., SHEBLE Gerald B., VENKATA, S.S. & VITTAL, Vijai.
Multimedia Courseware Sparks Interest in the Industry. IEEE Computer Applications in Power, 1998, 26-32.
