Faculty Scholarly Dissemination Grants

Title

Introducing Arduino Platform to Sophomores using an apt recipe

Department

School of Engineering

College

Padnos College of Engineering and Computing

Date Range

2013-2014

Disciplines

Engineering

Abstract

Microcontroller-based sensing and control has become an important part of many engineering disciplines. Engineering students at Grand Valley State University are introduced to microcontroller-based control in their introductory Digital Systems course which they take in their sophomore level. In this course, students learn to use the Arduino platform to design embedded systems. The Arduino board and programming language is an inexpensive way for faculty to teach embedded system design in introductory courses. However, if Arduino platform is not taught in the right context to the students they may not benefit from using this open-source prototyping platform to learn the basic fundamentals of embedded system design. The major contention in using any open source community such as Arduino is that they are usually focused on getting things to work as opposed to providing an insight into low-level technical aspects of embedded systems. In spite of this, the Arduino platform still provides students with enough experience and knowledge of some technical aspects of embedded system design by encapsulating them into custom functions. In this paper, we talk about an approach that we have taken so that the students can experience the best of both the worlds namely, Arduino built-in functions and low-level technical details to develop working and interesting designs.

Conference Name

2014 American Society For Engineering Education North Central Section Conference

Conference Location

2200 N. Squirrel Road, Rochester, Michigan 48309-4401

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