He created a virtual laboratory and made it accessible on the Internet, allowing his students to perform experiments more quickly. The virtual lab also gives students the opportunity to do lab work at home. King's approach has been to accurately simulate the machines and equipment that are actually available in his laboratories. This means that students have the opportunity to operate the equipment in the real laboratory but to run their experimental projects in the virtual one. More important, by using the virtual lab students are free to experiment more with projects.
Simulation is something that all engineers are acquainted with.
The improvement in the quality of students' project reports since the virtual lab has been introduced has been nothing less than astonishing. Professors Joe Zachary and Christopher R. Johnson have reformulated the introductory scientific programming courses for science and engineering. Originally the simple computer language courses were taught for the sake of learning the computer, but there were many science and engineering students who wanted to use the technology to find answers to problems that were specific to the subjects they were studying. The Engineering Science Programming class was created with this purpose in mind. This class gives students an opportunity to learn early in their undergraduate education how to use and apply the cutting-edge technology that is available at the University.