Conference ICBL2009 November 05 - 07, 2009 Florianopolis, Brazil 1(10) Exploring didactic possibilities of an electronic devices remote lab with students of Electronic Engineering Federico Lerro, Susana Marchisio, Oscar Von Pamel Faculty of Exact Sciences, Engineering and Surveying. Universidad Nacional de Rosario Abstract: This paper presents some results of an exploratory study carried out with the collaboration of students, whose aim was to examine the teaching potential of a self- developed remote lab, called “Electronic Physics Remote Lab”. The remote lab allows us, among other things, to test different kinds of diodes and transistors. Students of Electronic Engineering attending Physics IV have been asked to use the remote lab for the development of the following activities: a) to study the development of different junctions and infer about their constructive features and b) to obtain parameters of the devices under different test conditions, and to explain the behaviors observed from the point of view of the physical processes. Besides, students prepared test reports of the remote lab. Key words: Tele-learning, remote lab, exploratory study, possibilities of teaching use. 1 Introduction The inclusion of remote real experimentation through the use of remote labs in the field of engineers training is not new. A review work [1] which included the analysis of 42 publications between 1997 and 2007 reveals the existence of remote labs in different parts of the world designed for the teaching of contents in different Engineering disciplinary fields; among them, we may highlight Electronics, Robotics, Automatics and Physics as the fields that contain the largest amount of developments. The authors of this work [1] also point out the lack of teaching proposals through remote labs supported by education from a constructivist conception of learning. Whereas, in another work where the use and evaluation of a remote lab from the students’ point of view is reported [2], it is pointed out that there are few articles focused on the didactic usefulness of remote labs as a teaching tool. According to this and with the support of the words mentioned above for the training in the field of engineering, the question is: What does it mean to state that a remote lab – such as any other kind of technology – is a “teaching tool”? It is stated that a remote lab has “didactic usefulness”, but with the aim of building what kind of learning, or for the development of which competences? Which cognitive processes shall be favored by its use in a teaching context? Is it necessary for certain conditions to be present for the remote lab to become a teaching tool or resource? Which conditions?