Traffic Lights Engineering Academy: A Remote Online Education Solution for Creating K-12 STEM Projects Featuring Microcontrollers

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.