Design and implementation of virtual laboratories using wrapping and agent techniques

This work designs and implements a virtual laboratory that breaks the limits of time and location in traditional education under the innovation of network and information technology. Since the development of a virtual laboratory from scratch is time consuming and costly, our system can be used to wrap an existing CAI tool without knowing its source code. The key concept is to use mobile agents as middleware for wrapping. The framework consists of three parts: mobile agent execution environment, mobile agent, and learning platform. Experimental results demonstrate that the performance of our system outperforms a client-server-based virtual laboratory in terms of dispatching time.