ABSTRACT
The social distancing imposed by Covid-19 impacted the development of educational activities at all levels. Engineering education was specially challenged by the suspension of face-to-face activities, which paused the development of laboratory practices. The present work accounts for the design of virtual learning experiences in a Microcontrollers course. The free online tools 'Tinkercad Circuits' and 'Arduino' were used to simulate circuit programming and connections. These tools also allowed remote collaboration between students and teachers during lockdown. The results of the Mechatronics Engineering students (n=30) show that programming skills and hardware knowledge were developed. Additionally, the activities had a positive response from the students. On the other hand, according to the psychomotor domain taxonomy, the students had obstacles to their full development. It is concluded on the importance of integrating simulation to the development of activities and laboratory practices, as well as the advantages of hybrid teaching formats. © 2023 IEEE.
ABSTRACT
this paper describes experience of changing microcontroller related course from face-to-face to remote format, which took place in Riga Technical University during the COVID-19 pandemic during years 2020 and 2021. The name of the subject is Laboratory exercises in electronics. The primary ideology of that course is to let students touch and feel electronics without using any virtual stuff like simulators. Therefore, replacing everything with simulation is not a solution to such kind of course. In this publication, we want to describe system that is mixture of real physical system installed in the laboratory and remote interface interacting with the physical system. © 2022 IEEE.
ABSTRACT
Microcontroller programming is an essential part of K-12 Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) education. Experience with microcontroller programming is a gateway to many topics in this discipline, such as electrical engineering and programming. Hands-on experiences using microcontrollers are critical for student engagement and deeper understanding. However, as classes and field trips transitioned online due to the COVID-19 pandemic, educators encountered many difficulties adapting the microcontroller experiments to remote online education. One challenge is that traditional computer software for microcontroller experiments is not easy to set up. In remote education, students cannot be expected to install the software and do the configurations on their own computers at home. The second problem is that it is hard to monitor the students' progress and give feedback in real-time. Even though there are many online collaborative coding platforms, none of them support microcontrollers. In this paper, we introduce a comprehensive solution for remote education featuring microcontrollers. An online education platform was developed that allows the students to program the microcontroller using CircuitPython with no software installation or configuration. It also allows instructors to monitor students' work remotely in real-time. In addition, a microcontroller development board for experiments in which students apply programming knowledge to the function of traffic lights was designed. A CircuitPython module for the development board was also developed, which allowed the students to focus more on the logic of the traffic lights and less on potential hardware issues. This online education solution can also be adapted to meet different needs by designing different development boards for different scenarios, including breadboard experiments to focus on circuits, adopting more powerful microcontrollers for advanced programming, and a variety of other applications for use in differentiated instruction. The proposed traffic lights engineering academy was provided to a local school district and got positive feedback. The experiences and best practices are also discussed in this paper. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2022.