Intelligent systems development in a non engineering curriculum

Abstract

Much of computer system development today is programming in the large-systems of millions of lines of code distributed across servers and the web. At the same time, microcontrollers have also become pervasive in everyday products, economical to manufacture, and represent a different level of learning about system development. Real world systems at this level require integrated development of custom hardware and software.How can academic institutions give students a view of this other extreme-programming on small microcontrollers with specialized hardware? Full scale system development including custom hardware and software is expensive, beyond the range of any but the larger engineering oriented universities, and hard to fit into a typical length course. The course described here is a solution using microcontroller programming in high level language, small hardware components, and the Arduino open source microcontroller. The results of the hands-on course show that student programmers with limited hardware knowledge are able to build custom devices, handle the complexity of basic hardware design, and learn to appreciate the differences between large and small scale programming.

A safety-aware, systems-based approach to teaching software testing

“…Nowadays, affordable and steep learning curve microcontrollers such as Raspberry Pi, Arduino, NXP appeared on the market, allowing also non-technical CS students to successfully master embedded systems programming. This is demonstrated by an increasing number of reports on using microcontrollers in CS teaching [17][18][19]. Safety emphasis and exposure to physical devices for teaching software engineering have been recently reported in [20], with findings similar to ours.…”

A framework architecture for student learning in distributed embedded systems

“…For some time, academic preparation for computer science and engineering students has focused on individual embedded systems using microcontrollers [6,7] and hardware prototypes at the level of individual stand-alone systems. More complex distributed systems were primarily studied through higher-level networked and distributed systems using client/server architectures, distributed databases, and the internet [8,9].…”

Teaching and assessing programming fundamentals for non majors with visual programming

“…The initial common assignments were designed to cover multiple ways of getting and using information and introduced students to the abilities and limitations of the App Inventor tool. The custom app was open to student's imagination to encourage experimentation and exploration of programming concepts similar to studio learning and tinkering courses [3,4,8]. Figure 1 is an example of a student's custom course project incorporating the above programming concepts.…”