Because of access restrictions imposed during the Covid-19 pandemic, access to the physical laboratories of our university was no longer possible for students. Lectures requiring specific hardware which is only available to students in laboratories could no longer take place. Therefore, we developed a solution which allows remote access to hardware of our laboratory. The FLOSS application WorkAdventure is used as base for our platform. WorkAdventure (WA) already makes privacy friendly online meetings possible in a 16-bit 2D computer game design. We extended WA to provide interactive, virtual lecture rooms by integrating BigBlueButton (BBB). However, privately communicating with fellow students sitting nearby is still possible. This creates a more realistic feeling when attending online lectures. As far as this solution is well known, but we wanted considerably more... In order to give lecturers and students different rights in BBB, we reimplemented parts of the proprietary administration services of WA. With them, we can give out different invitation links, so they also act as access control method. Furthermore, we embed noVNC, a web application acting as VNC client, into WA. With noVNC, it is possible to access virtual machines (VM) we set up on the computers residing in our physical laboratory from home. Here, we also developed a software which makes it possible to work in groups on the VMs remotely. This software puts all users connected to a VM into a Jitsi conference room, which allows the users to communicate. By using USB pass-through, it is possible to connect the physical hardware to the VMs. Then, by accessing the VMs, students can control the hardware remotely. Therefore, we were able to offer the lectures and exercises requiring special hardware by offering them in our virtual laboratory. Our software solution has a high transferability: New use-cases can be addressed quickly, as web applications can be integrated into WA easily. On the other side, parts of our solution can be used independently in own instances targeting other use cases. We invite developers to participate in the project and further develop the solution for possible use in high schools. |