Through the project, a unique instructional laboratory facility will be made available to a large number of undergraduate science and engineering students across the nation. The Networked Instructional Instrumentation Facility at the University of Illinois at Chicago allows students to access, via the Internet, a real laboratory in which undergraduate electronics laboratory experiments may be performed. At the hub is a measurement server, a hardware and software facility developed at UIC, that responds to measurement requests in the form of SPICE netlists, currently used in many undergraduate courses for circuit simulation. This unique facility allows the student to compare simulated results with actual measurements on a library of devices and circuits and also to perform experiments on circuits that are difficult to simulate. Students see the results within a few seconds and can submit new measurement requests based upon their interpretation of the results and under the guidance of instructional materials produced at UIC and at other universities that use the facility. The project includes a major outreach effort to assist science and engineering instructors across the country in the preparation of instructional materials utilizing the facility.
