Virtual analog and digital communications laboratory: LaViCAD: On line interactive tool for learning communications systems

The virtual analog and digital communications laboratory LaViCAD has been designed at the UPC and it results a useful tool to verify different communication systems performance and also signal processing techniques, subjects given in courses typically included in the curriculum of any electrical engineering degree. LaViCAD tool has become a flexible, sustainable and on-line freely offered educational platform and it can be updated whenever new content is required. At pedagogical level, the use of a virtual laboratory facilitates the learning of certain matters, acting as a connection between the theoretical contents of a communications system course and their practical understanding and experimentation. Furthermore, LAVICAD provides resources for professors to organize different teaching activities in their courses. These activities can be used in different environments as for instance in a classroom given in the context of a full attendance course or in a homework activity at a distance learning course. The aim of this paper is two-fold: On one hand to describe the main technical features that make LAVICAD an original fully reusable and reprogrammable tool in signal processing and communication systems courses. On the other hand to show some preliminary academic results obtained with the use of LAVICAD verifying how it improves the level of success.