About Packet Tracer
Packet Tracer is a self-paced, visual, interactive teaching and learning tool. It is designed to increase interaction between students and instructors, promote student learning, and enhance instructor presentations. This technology is a new and fun way to expand teaching and learning experiences beyond the limitations of a traditional lab environment. Packet Tracer helps resolve some common challenges that instructors face on a daily basis, while enabling us to explore new frontiers in networking education.
Product Feature Solution Fit
Packet Tracer is an enhancement of the current standalone product. It expands upon the feature set that exists. This product is meant to be used as an education product that provides exposure to the command-line interface of Cisco devices for practice and discovery learning. It also improves on the visualization components, making it easier for instructors to deliver presentations and for students to understand the inner workings and interactions of networking equipment to perform data transfer and support communications.
Key Features
In the Simulation and Visualization Mode, students can see and control time intervals, the inner workings of data transfer, and the propagation of data across a network. This helps students understand the fundamental concepts behind network operations. A solid understanding of network fundamentals can help accelerate learning about related concepts.
The physical view of devices such as routers, switches, and hosts, presents graphical representations of expansion cards and identifies the capabilities of each card. The physical view also provides geographic representations, including multiple cities, buildings, and wiring closets.
The Activity Wizard allows users to set-up a scenario using text, a basic network topology, and predefined packets. The activity feedback is shown in summary format. Students can create and answer “what if” scenarios and instructors can create their own self-evaluated activities that present immediate feedback to students on their proficiency in completing the activity.
The Real-Time Mode provides students with a viable alternative to real equipment and allows them to gain configuration practice before working with real equipment.
Additional Features
Lab grading function
Modular devices
User-friendly CLI and integrated help feature
Different device models for creating custom networks
Tutorial
International language support
Simple mode
