DEBUGGING SKILLS
The first step in this project was to determine what real-world situations we would capture in our virtual laboratory. Clearly we needed to have an environment that looked like the real lab. This meant a breadboard environment, wires, circuit elements, and test instruments. While some aspects of this environment are provided in commercial tools (examples include Electronics Workbench (Interactive Image Technologies Ltd.) [I], Pspice (Orcad) [2], Design Works (Capilano Computing) [3] and others) we felt that specific features related to debugging were missing from existing tools. Nonetheless, as we discuss in the implementation portion of the paper, we required an interface to an existing simulator to provide values for the "instruments". When analyzing our many years of lab experience we
reduced the problems that students face in a real lab when a good theoretical design did not function correctly to be the following: