A Remote System for Water Tank Level Monitoring and Control - a Collaborative Case-study Nuno Brito 1 , Paulo Ribeiro 1 , Filomena Soares 1 , Carlos Monteiro 2 , Vitor Carvalho 2 , Rosa Vasconcelos 3 1 Industrial Electronics Department, University of Minho, Guimarães, Portugal, e-mail: fsoares @dei.uminho.pt 2 Polytechnic Institute of Cávado and Ave (IPCA), Barcelos, Portugal 3 Textile Engineering Department, University of Minho, Guimarães, Portugal Abstract- This paper presents the design and implementation of a remote experiment for controlling the level of a two-tank system. It describes also the management of the team work: it was performed in a remote collaborative methodology by two students of the fourth year of the Industrial Electronics Master Course at University of Minho (UM) and one student from the third year of the Industrial Informatics course of the Polytechnic Institute of Cávado and Ave (IPCA), both high education institutions in Minho region. It is a project work, implemented by undergraduate students and for future students use. The experiment is controlled using an on-off controller and a PID algorithm. The kit is monitored by a custom developed LabVIEW environment. The remote user can test the digital algorithms and parameters, change level reference values and register the output data. I. INTRODUCTION In these last years ,the teaching/learning process has been under a detailed analysis, and severe changes have been slowly implemented. The attitude towards the education changed. The student must be an active element in this process. The student is the main actor in the learning/teaching arena; he/she should be engaged in doing something besides listening to a lecturer and taking notes. This implies not only a precise definition of objectives and capabilities to be acquired, but also strategies and teaching methodologies reformulation. Towards an assisted learning methodology, it must be set available the theoretical and practical tools for a successful target. Laboratories are particularly important: here students can test a theory or prove the concept. The well- know paradigm that students retain better what is taught if they are able to practice comes into sight [1]. Nevertheless, the success of laboratorial classes depends on the organization scheme and financial support. Especially in engineering courses, it is difficult to install and maintain several working places in a dedicated technical laboratory. Often, the equipments are expensive, there is not enough laboratorial space and also the qualified personnel for supervision and maintenance is not sufficient. This problem becomes highly important if the physical and human resources are replicated at each higher education school. The remote laboratory concept has overcome this problem. With the use of the Internet as a vehicle of knowledge transmission and the availability of the wireless communication in the Universities campus, the Web laboratories are filling this gap, by optimizing material, human resources, space and time. The idea is carry out laboratory experiments via the Internet, anytime and anywhere. The students can also have an immediate feedback, allowing them to work at their own space, providing the opportunity to practice when and where they please. Following this trend, two groups of teachers, from UM and from IPCA, both at Minho region in the North of Portugal, decided to join efforts for designing and implementing a remote control experiment. The experimental rig is to be mounted in UM and the students from IPCA and UM remotely access the experiment. Also, this project implements a new teaching/learning methodology. It is being performed in a remote collaborative approach. Two students from UM (from the 4 th year of the integrated Master of Industrial Electronics Engineering) are remotely working with a student from IPCA (from the 3rd year of the Industrial Informatics course). Each team has a predefined task and is supervised (by direct contact or remotely) by teachers from both institutions. During the semester, the students have near to 15 hours of direct contact with the teachers, 15 hours of remote contact with the teachers and 75 hours of team work. The evaluation procedure consists of two oral presentations, one at the middle of the semester and another at the end, a written report, a poster, placed at the university atrium, and a component regarding the practical performance. In order to achieve the main goals proposed on this paper, the following organization was considered: Section 1 presents the challenge of the work; Section 2 describes background concepts on collaborative work as a teaching/learning tool; Section 3 shows how the authors manage to implement this collaborative task; Section 4 is devoted to the presentation of the developed kit and finally, in section 5, there are presented the main conclusions of this study. II. COLLABORATIVE WORK Regarding the teaching/learning methodology employed in developing this work, a collaborative task [2] was followed. Collaborative learning refers to methodologies and