The paper presents the results of design research, the final product of which is a virtual laboratory for students in the field of information technology for a course on algorithms and data structures. The work justifies the necessity and relevance of developing and integrating into the educational process tools that enhance IT students’ acquisition of professional competencies and skills. Emphasis is placed on the importance of IT students acquiring practical skills as a crucial factor in their value in the IT job market. It is noted that e-learning tools and virtual laboratories, in particular, are effective means of supporting self-paced, instructor-led, and offline studying. The paper describes the main results of each stage of the conducted design research, namely: problem analysis, creation of domain models, building the solution, and preparing the developed virtual laboratory for testing and integration into the educational process. The models that formalize domain knowledge, including its functional and object models, are presented in this work. The proposed models are universal and can be applied during the development of virtual laboratories for academic IT study. The proposed design solutions were validated by introducing the developed virtual laboratory to the educational process of training second-year students of bachelor studies in the specialty of software engineering at the Dniprovsky State Technical University (Ukraine).