Open hardware platforms in a first course of the Computer Engineering undergraduate program

Abstract

This paper presents a new methodology proposal and hands-on activities in the Introduction to Computer Engineering (ICE) course, based on open hardware platforms. The proposal has been adopted in the Computer Engineering undergraduate program at the Federal University of Mato Grosso do Sul (UFMS) -Brazil. Most of the ICE courses from computer engineering programs around the world have put focus on teaching initial basic theoretical concepts of algorithms, logic, and digital systems. The ICE course at UFMS has been organized to encompass from initial basic concepts up to a practical and motivating set of experimental activities in order to clarify the program focus and to connect the concepts to practical applications. To evaluate the impacts of this new curriculum and methodology, an online anonymous survey has been carried out with students from 2011, 2012, and 2013 classes. After a statistical analysis and validation of the answers, 28% of the students have pointed that the activities have been determinant to increase their motivation to study computer engineering. The impacts on students motivation, since the first semester, have been observed in the students evasion rate. The percentage of evasions in the computer engineering is less than other engineering programs at UFMS.

A Review of Embedded Systems Education in the Arduino Age: Lessons Learned and Future Directions

“…Such an advantage does not only help in improving students' performance in classes [14,15], but it can also attract students to the engineering major. For example, switching the course technology to Arduino in [18] has resulted in minimizing the students' evasion rate from the computer engineering program.…”

“…Arduino has been adopted in many courses that span the engineering curriculum including Introduction to Engineering [18,[28][29][30][31][32][33], Chemistry [34][35], Physics [36][37][38], Electronics [39][40][41], Control and Robotics [19][20][42][43], Fuzzy Logic [44], and DSP [45]. Arduino with its overall simplicity, availability of on-line resources, ease of acquiring parts, and fast prototyping process overcomes many of the difficulties stated in [9].…”