An introductory microcontroller programming laboratory course for first-year students

Abstract

This article presents an introductory microcontroller programming course on digital signal processing for undergraduate university level. The course is intended to provide insight into information technology and to prepare students for more complex exercises later on in their studies. Solutions to overcome pedagogical obstacles like the fear of new technologies and to minimise technological incompatibilities between different operating systems while setting up a programming tool chain are presented. This leads to an increased scalability of the course, allowing hundreds of students to attend each year. In the case presented here, the average number of participants was 300. The problem-oriented task assignments are defined leading to a final creative improvement task, for which the students' solutions are analysed. The course is evaluated and an outlook on further improvements is given.