iLab to bring virtual labs to high schools

A group of researchers at Northwestern are set on giving high school science a modern makeover: they're moving the science lab online.

The project, called iLab Network, is using the Internet to give high school students remote access to the science labs of universities around the world, all with just a few clicks of a button. Kemi Jona, principal investigator for the iLab project, said he hoped the project would remove the economic barriers that high schools face in teaching science. Jona is an associate professor and the director of NU's Office of Science, Technology, Engineering and Math Education Partnerships.

"No matter where you live or where you go to school - you can be in inner-city Chicago, you could be in (a) rural downstate district with only 100 kids in your school - you can still get access to top-notch lab equipment that you would never have access to before," Jona said. "It really levels the playing field."

The office, in partnership with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is midway through the two-year project, funded by a $1 million grant from the National Science Foundation. The project works by connecting lab devices like microscopes and signal analyzers to the Internet. Teachers and students in high school classrooms can then control the devices remotely with their computers, watching their experiments in real-time via webcam. Students are able to track and save their data and monitor experiments of their designs - all without being in the same room of the equipment they're using.

The office staff trained 23 teachers across the country for the pilot program of iLab Network. The majority of teachers were Illinois-based, including four teachers from Evanston Township High School. Mark Vondracek, an AP Physics teacher at ETHS and a participant in the iLab Network pilot program, wrote in an e-mail that the program could become a valuable tool for high school teachers who are, above all else, strapped for classroom time.

"There is so much material to get through ­- and most schools have single periods - that doing labs is largely ignored or rushed," he wrote. Students are able to access the online labs from home, allowing teachers to spend instructional time in other ways.

Albert Kim, a Weinberg senior studying biology, said he remembers rushing through labs as a high school student at Centennial High School in central Illinois.

"My high school lacked a lot of equipment," Kim said. "Sometimes we'd just watch our teacher do the experiment, or only a few people would be able to do a lab because we were short on time or on lab supplies."

Vondracek said iLab also provides high school students with valuable real-world experience.

"It is an important experience for them to have prior to college, where there is a good chance they will be doing something similar in a science class," he wrote. "Accessing experiments remotely has become an important tool in a modern scientist's arsenal and is pretty common in some fields."

Jona said he sees iLab as an opportunity to give students a more "authentic" view of science - a discipline where experiments are conducted over and over instead of just one time before the bell rings.

"Making mistakes in science is actually a good thing, because that's where you learn - if you have the chance to do it again," he said. "Which is the problem in most (high school) labs. If you don't get the answer the first time, you get a 'C' and it's over. But that's not science; that's school."

Jona said he hopes the project could have far-reaching implications for science in the classroom, by changing how teachers spend class time, how districts allocate their resources and how students feel about science.

"That's kind of the core of the idea - to use this kind of technology to create important changes in the way science is taught in high schools," he said.

claralingle2012@u.northwestern.edu