Federated Non-Traditional Practical Work for Engineering Education

Federated Non-Traditional
Practical Work for
Engineering Education
Professor Timothy Drysdale

Note on slide content
• This is a larger slide deck than I could have presented at
EUCAP
• It is from a talk I gave at NI Days Europe in Munich October
2019 (I choose this approach due to extreme operational
workloads leading online exams at this time)
“Breaking News”: For those that may be interested – I made a
PDF exam marking system (in use by for School of Engineering
exams, and default in School of Maths)
• https://edin.ac/36DQWbY
• https://pdf.gradex.io/
• https://github.com/timdrysdale/gradex-cli

The future is
already here
— it's just not
very evenly
distributed.
Photo credit: Frederic Poirot timothy.drysdale@ed.ac.uk

Electricity Demonstration, 18th Century is a photograph by Science Photo Library timothy.drysdale@ed.ac.uk

University of Giessen, founded 1607
Liebig introduced labs ca. 190 years ago
Rennselaer Polytechnic Institute, founded 1824
Eaton introduced labs shortly after
https://www.ucalgary.ca/uci/abroad/exchange/giessen
www.lib.rpi.edu/dept/library/html/Archives/buildings/winslow.html
Student feedback does lead to change!
Now nearly 200 years of labs timothy.drysdale@ed.ac.uk

Teaching
labs
created
Computer-
based
equipment
What
Next
?
timothy.drysdale@ed.ac.uk

Laboratories now … large scale, dedicated spaces
~£90M Capital
19 Labs, 50 Staff
Serves 5000 students
The Diamond, University of
Sheffield, 2015
The CTL, University of
Birmingham, 2018
~£40M Capital
3500 UG STEM studentstimothy.drysdale@ed.ac.uk

5%
20%
50%
x4 x2.5

“How do we deal with this expansion [of student numbers]?
How do we still engage students early on with the world of
engineering? How do we show them the messiness of
engineering, the political and social aspects? ... How do we do
this beyond the capstone project? This type of education, the
type of education we want to have, is expensive. So how do
you do this for all students, large cohorts of students, without
compromising on everything?”
R. Graham, (2018) “The global state of the art in engineering
education,” New Engineering Education Transformation,
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA

Devil’s
advocate
(with love)

https://www.teaching-matters-blog.ed.ac.uk/learning-to-code-in-context/

www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSQtI9PPjok
openEngineering Lab, The Open University UK

International & UK Awards:
openEngineering/openSTEM labs
• National Instruments
Global Engineering Impact Award
2019 (Education)
• The Guardian
Teaching Excellence Award 2018
• Global Online Labs Consortium
Remote Experiment Award 2018
• Times Higher Education
Leadership & Management Award
2017
(Outstanding Digital Innovation)

Automated evaluation
Authentic assessment
• AI for observability 24/7
• EJ framework tolerates AI limitations
• Break toxic cycle of feedback dependency

Digital alternative for ALL STEM subjects:
Non-traditional practical work
Pedagogy
Practicality
Sustainability
-Remote labs
-Blended labs
-Virtual labs
-Simulations

Any teacher who
can be replaced
by a machine,
. . . should be.
Photo credit: celestis.com

Pedagogical approaches
Quality/Benefit
Human
Technology

T. D. Drysdale, S. Kelley, A.-M. Scott, V. Dishon, J. Scoles
The University of Edinburgh
Edinburgh, Scotland
A. Weightman
The University of Manchester
Manchester, England
Post—humanistic 'practices of
community' for non-traditional
laboratory work
S. Watts
The University of Bath
Bath, England
R. J. Lewis
Cardiff University
Cardiff, Wales
https://github.com/timdrysdale/sefi2019 timothy.drysdale@ed.ac.uk

Understanding student and staff practice

Should we be
teaching ‘best’
(only one)
practice?

Traditional lab work ….

What learning is like in NTPW
Courtesy Jon Platek and Wikimedia Commons
Exploration
Surprise

Photo by Franck V. on Unsplash
Teacher-like
functionality
is inevitable

“In the software-centered future, individuals and institutions won’t compete with computer
programs so much as they’ll compete with each other over who can work best alongside
computers.”
Sonnad, N. (2014) Beautiful Twitter bots tell us what the future of automation is all about. Quartz, June 12
2014. http://qz.com/219696
From workshop on Teacherbots by Kathrin Haag, Stewart Cromar, Sian Bayne
University of Edinburgh www.teacherbot.ed.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/Build-your-own-chatbot.pptx

Open-ended practice
As the students move to more senior years, user interfaces should
become more open-ended. For project work, activities might be
programmed directly by the student and/or the data analysed in Jupyter
notebooks
NTPW
activities
Staff
Students
Educational Collaboration
in practices of community

Workshop technicians +
Learning Technology Developers

Scale of many Scale of oneScale of some

https://github.com/timdrysdale/penduino

Preview
Very early prototypes!
(not available after event)

Pendulum
Pendulum
Pendulum
Edited: links removed because not available after event

LabVIEW can interface to a variety of single-board platforms

Mockup developed with V. Dishon

NI ELVIS III

Last login: Mon Nov 18 23:26:32 2019 from 129.215.xxx.xxx
xxxx@NI-ELVIS-III-03167F7E:~# df ./ -h
df ./ -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
ubi1:rootfs 851M 788M 59M 94% /
xxxx@NI-ELVIS-III-03167F7E:~# uname -a
Linux NI-ELVIS-III-03167F7E 4.9.47-rt37-ni-6.0.0f1 #1 SMP PREEMPT RT Fri Mar
2 21:16:39 CST 2018 armv7l armv7l armv7l GNU/Linux
365 MB free out of the box
Python easily eats 160+ MB

https://github.com/ni/NI-ELVIS-III-Python-Examples timothy.drysdale@ed.ac.uk

import time
from nielvis import LEDs, Led
with LEDs() as LED:
led = Led.LED0
led_on_off = True
for x in range(0, 10):
LED.write(led, led_on_off)
time.sleep(0.5)
led_on_off = not led_on_off
https://github.com/ni/NI-ELVIS-III-Python-Examples/blob/master/examples/digital/LED.py timothy.drysdale@ed.ac.uk

WebRTC pain points for
unattended experiments?
- system complexity
- connection anxiety
- connection time
- automated camera serving issues
- moving target
- non-human uses cases are edge
(Been there done that, for the last lab,
but not appropriate this time around)

https://github.com/timdrysdale/elviseyes
<setup>
async def listen(DIO):
global bank, left, right, bottom, duration, lights
uri = "ws://localhost:8888/ws/elvis"
async with websockets.connect(uri) as websocket:
while True:
ok = False
msg = ""
message = await websocket.recv()
<process message>
<set outputs>
reply = {"result":ok, "message": msg}
await websocket.send(json.dumps(reply))
if __name__ == "__main__":
# configure a DIO session
with DigitalInputOutput(bank, [left, right, bottom]) as DIO:
asyncio.get_event_loop().run_until_complete(listen(DIO))
asyncio — Asynchronous I/O

Stopping and starting USB camera
streaming causes problems ….
libv4l2: error turning on stream: No space left on
device VIDIOC_STREAMON: No space left on device
$ ffmpeg -f v4l2 -framerate 25 -video_size 640x480 -i /dev/video0 -f mpegts -
codec:v mpeg1video -s 640x480 -b:v 1000k -bf 0 http://<somewhere>

Stopping and starting usb camera
streaming is rolling the dice ….
libv4l2: error turning on stream: No space left on
device VIDIOC_STREAMON: No space left on device
https://github.com/timdrysdale/vw timothy.drysdale@ed.ac.uk

https://github.com/timdrysdale/vw timothy.drysdale@ed.ac.uk

$ GOARCH=arm
$ GOARM=7
$ GOOS=linux
$ go build
$ scp vw-arm7 <elvis>

https://github.com/timdrysdale/vw
$ curl -X POST -H "Content-Type:
application/json" -d '{"stream":”data",
"destination":
"wss://<some.relay.server>/bi/elvis",
"id":"0"}'
http://localhost:8888/api/destinations
Streaming configuration is dynamic
No business logic in the experiment
Reduced deployment and maintenance burden

ElvisEyesEdited: link removed because not available after event

LabVIEW NXG Web Module – create web UI in familiar LabVIEW environment

NTPW supporting practices of community
• What then can be done in higher education to provide
experience of this?
• Subject knowledge has long-term relevance, and staff are
authorities, so it cannot be done in the existing curriculum.
• NTPW activities offer a rapid refresh and update cycle (unlike
conventional laboratories), where students engage with leading
edge technological concepts.
• Posthuman gaze: Observe and support the behaviour of
relations between the technologies, senior students, tutors, and
staff when handling newer technologies/concepts before the
concepts and practices around those technologies have
stabilised.

Federated Non-Traditional Practical Work for Engineering Education

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