Instructional strategies and design for immersive wireless communication tutorials and exercises

Abstract

This paper presents first steps towards development and assessment of a curriculum and tutorials built around hands-on exercises intended to introduce introductory and advanced concepts in wireless communications to current and future STEM professionals in a more effective way. We describe the motivation for the tutorials and our approach to designing and developing the tutorials, and provide a list of planned topics. Assessment results are provided for two tutorials, one of which included an exercise that employed CORNET, an Internet-accessible softwaredefined radio testbed at Virginia Tech. The tutorials were piloted with ten students in a graduate-level software-defined radio course. Based on these results we present conclusions and approaches for improving the initial tutorial exercise and tutorials and exercises to be developed.