Remote labs in developing countries an experience in Brazilian public education

This paper presents a study case about the application of low cost remote experiments in physics classes in Brazilian public schools. Practical activities are extremely important in teaching sciences; however, most Brazilian public schools do not have laboratories. Thus, remote experiments can be an efficient way to meet this need. The use of open source tools is an alternative to proprietary technologies, turning possible remote labs cheaper than hands-on labs or other modalities of remote labs. The architecture proposed allows access via computers or mobile devices making use of PHP, HTML5 and JavaScript. The user can control variables of the experiments, and see the results in real-time via video streaming. This technology was applied experimentally in physics classes of two public basic schools in Brazil.