Construction of Virtual Experiment Laboratory for Education of Computer engineering

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From the viewpoint of developing experimental subjects of electronics/computer engineering, we proposed virtual laboratory experiments on the computer screen. On the basis of DDE (Dynamic Data Exchange) of MICROSOFT WINDOWS,the virtual materials realistically operate when microprocessor (MPU) programs are executed with the MPU simulator. The present system enables students to learn conventional microcomputer experiments, for example, control of lighting LEDs (Light Emitting Diode), stepper motor control and the data acquisition with A/D (Analog/Digital) converters. User interface of the present system has the following capabilities :1. Automatic loading of all of the application software developed for the virtual laboratory experiments when the menu page of experiments is started.2. Automatic loading and executing of MPU programs by depression of a "start" button in every window of experimental materials.In addition, we developed a supporting system for MPU programming : clicking on a link of the MPU instruction box moves you to the selected page explaining the meaning of the MPU instruction, the number of states, the number of machine cycles, flag operations etc. We let the second year students who had already experienced the conventional microcomputer experiments try using the virtual laboratory ; their reaction to the system was almost positive.Further investigations on efficacy of learning are needed so as to realize the replacement of existing laboratory experiments with the virtual laboratory. According to software linking between the experiment menu, description of experimental contents and the virtual experiments, we will regularly construct a hyper text including the virtual experiment environments.