VILAB
Virtual Computer Science Laboratory
University of Hagen

Virtual Laboratory?

Why is this platform called a "Virtual Laboratory"?

   Working in real laboratories gives you very quick feedback about your results; a chemist, for example, will expect a specific chemical reaction after mixing the chemicals. If nothing (or something completely unexpected) happens, he will know he may have chosen the wrong substances.

   Software to simulate such situations on computers has been in existence for quite some time now. It is quite common for students of natural sciences to simulate experiments in virtual laboratories and even children get in touch with comparable technologies in form of so called "edutainment software". To help our computer science students benefit from these developments, we created the VILAB environment which offers teaching tools for computer science.

   An important point of VILAB is the virtual tutor. It does not only report on success or failure on the student's side but helps pinpoint problems with adaptive feedback. We thus encourage our students to solve their individual problems in a "learning by doing" fashion.

    VILAB offers eight lab stations that cover the following areas of computer science:

• LS1: Programming: object oriented (Java), imperative (C), logic (Prolog), and functional (LISP-dialect Scheme)
• LS2: Neural networks
• LS3: Relational database systems
• LS4: Knowledge representation / knowledge processing
• LS5: Computational lexicon and language comprehension
• LS6: Natural language queries to databases
• LS7: Special problems of knowledge representation
• LS8: Practice and experiments in medical informatics