A LearnablebyDesign (LEAD) Model for Designing Experiments for Computer Science Labs India graduates 1.5 million engineering students every year, majority of them from its Tier 2 and Tier 3 colleges where there is severe shortage of qualified faculty and lab infrastructure, and where English is second or third language for most students. To provide affordable virtual laboratories to these engineering colleges, Government of India runs the Virtual Labs project with a select set of participating institutions to create virtual labs required for entire engineering student population of India. The program suffers from two problems: 1) lack of focus on pedagogy and learnability of labs being created, and 2) little ability to scale to more teachers and subject matter experts to produce labs aligned to local contexts. This paper presents a model (LEAD model) for the design of virtual labs for a data structures and algorithms course in computer science and is intended to address the problems stated above. The model encodes the principles of learning in the design and structure of an experiment so that labs can be learnable by design. The model is based on constructivist theory of learning. It uses Bloomu0027s Taxonomy for defining learning objectives and applies Merrillu0027s first principles and Gagneu0027s 9 events of instruction as instructional design methodologies. To ensure tasks in an experiment indeed aid learning, the model requires a mapping between tasks and learning principles to be created and published along with the experiment. The model uses a pedagogy that lays strong emphasis on conceptual understanding without the use of code or program. To demonstrate the efficacy of this model, we present the data analysis of the feedback from early users of one the experiments. Even though limited in scope, data shows that experiments built using LEAD model can aid understanding for the students.

Enhancing Virtual Labs Usage in Colleges Virtual Labs is an MHRD (Ministry of Human Resource Development, India) initiative in which over 1100 virtual experiments are freely available to engineering students across India and the rest of the globe to access and learn. Until the beginning of 2018, the lab usages by students were mostly in the push mode during the workshops. The average usage per workshop was significantly low, at about 8 usages per student. Interventions were proposed in the process to improve the usage by enhancing u0027Arousalu0027 and u0027Choicesu0027 as studentsu0027 motivation. Qualitative observation of the results shows that students conducted more than the requested 15 experiments, along with the expectation of instant appreciation and recognition. This change in the process to create extrinsic motivation increased the usage per student from 8.62 to 19.7. selfreported motivation levels of students after doing the experiments improved from 5 to 8, 10 being the highest on the scale. There was a reduced variability represented by the coefficient of variation changing from 51.9% to 21.39%.