| The Virtual Soils Laboratory is an HTML-based teaching tool developed for use in conjunction with the Junior-level Cooper Union CE-131 Soil Mechanics course for Civil Engineering students. The class incorporates a 3.0 credit lecture and a 1.5 credit laboratory session, which both culminate in the presentation of a semester-long flexible pavement design. The original laboratory procedure documents were paper-based and only covered the first five of eleven experiments. These experiments were initially converted into an electronic format under a previous Thesis Candidate. This project successfully implemented the remaining six experiments and addressed several major issues that were identified as necessary for upgrade or implementation by users of the original site. The result is Cooper Union's first truly Internet-based class component, which may be expanded into a full course at the option of the Department, and with additional feature implementation as described under Recommendations. |
