Experiences on the Laboratory of A Computer Networking Course

The Information Technologies (IT) have reached a high relevance in our society. The development and usage of this kind of technologies are constantly evolving. Therefore, in this regard, a high quality, advanced and technical education must be offered to the IT students in order to produce well-educated graduates that will work on the next IT generation. For the students, the laboratory experiments play a crucial role in their formation as a way to put into practice the theoretical concepts and allowing them to see a "real world" application of the more theoretical concepts. When talking about IT and Computer Science (CS), the laboratory turns out even more important, if possible. The experience obtained by the students in the laboratories will be extremely important when developing their future professional activity. This work presents the experience with an emulation tool named NetGUI, specifically designed to be used by students who are learning the basic concepts of computing networks. This tool provides a graphic interface to create network configurations with little effort and it greatly simplifies the interaction with simulated devices. The experience in a Computer Networking course is presented, when changing some of the laboratory tasks. Some new hands-on experiments were designed mainly focused on the network layer of the TCP/IP stack. Exercises about interface configuration, routing and traffic analysis were proposed. The objective was to help students to understand better some important theoretical concepts of the network layer (e.g. routing). The evaluation was performed by means of an anonymous inquiry and analyzing the students' marks. Based on the inquiries, the students considered satisfactory their experience with NetGUI.Moreover, most of them concluded that it helped them to understand some important networking concepts (e.g. how a computer network works). However, there was no significant improvement (nor worsening) in the final exam marks after changing the laboratory experiments. This was due to the fact that the final exam marks depend on several factors, being the laboratory experiments just another one.