A Virtual Labs Experiment is a systematic collection of learning resources for Engineering students to learn about a single topic in a subject. Each experiment consists of some theory and reading material, interactive simulations and quizes or tests. The authoring process may be different for each institute but the end result is a collection of web-pages that are published together as an Experiment.

Each experiment is a part of of Lab. A Lab is a conceptually a collection of Experiments related to a subject. A Lab is published as a collection of web-pages that provide an entry point for a user to learn about that subject. The list of experiments included in a lab provides links to all the available experiments.

Creating a publishable lab along with all it’s experiments, is a process that involves a lot of manual effort that does not add any value to the lab itself. Labgen is a command-line tool that helps in avoiding all the repeatative effort involved in creating a lab from individual experiments and other lab content.

The following processes are supported by labgen:

1. Generation of Lab pages.
2. Deployment of Lab
3. Build and Deployment of Experiments

The automated build and deployment of experiments is supported only for experiments generated using the Phase 3 experiment authoring process (link?) defined by IIT-B.

1. node 12.12.x
   • Download link: node
   • recommended to install via nvm
2. npm 6.11.x

npm install

Create a new lab repository on Github or clone and existing one. The repository should be empty.

To start with the process of lab generation, you need a Lab Descriptor.

Lab Descriptor is a json file the contains data for lab pages and other information for lab and experiment deployment. This document describes the structure of a lab descriptor file.

Fill all the values in the <path/to/lab/repo>/lab-descriptor.json file generated above and create a pull-request to get the lab-descriptor approved.

Continuing the init example, lets see how to submit the completed lab-descriptor for verification.

In the lab repository, switch to a new branch and edit the json.

cd ~/virtual-labs/myNewLab
git checkout -b lab-descriptor
editor lab-descriptor.json

After filling the json push the file to remote and create a pull request.

git add lab-descriptor.json
git commit -m "lab-descriptor for verification"
git push origin lab-descriptor

Once this pull request is merged to master, do not make any new changes to the lab-descriptor.

From the Phase-3-Lab-Template repository, run the following.

npm run labgen -- --release minor <path/to/lab/repo>

To build an individual experiment first clone the experiment and run the following:

cd <path/to/experiment/repo>
git clone https://github.com/virtual-labs/ph3-lab-mgmt/
cd ph3-lab-mgmt
npm install
npm run build-exp ../

Or, from with this repository:

npm run build-exp <path/to/exp/repo>

The first method is useful when running the script from the github actions pipeline.

The experiment can be found in the build directory with the experiment repository location.

• DOCS:
  • Lab Build Process
    • Lab descriptor - DONE
    • templates - TODO
    • staging and deployment process - DONE
  • Experiment build process
    • experiment descriptor - DONE
    • experiment model - DONE
  • Analytics - DONE
  • script usage - DONE
• quiz - TODO
• exp process integration and testing - DONE

• identify modules - WIP
• FAQ - WIP
• label -> backend => build-process - DONE