Introducing information technology students to cyber-physical systems using a lab experience

Abstract

Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS), or embedded computers, are not traditionally emphasized in Information Technology (IT) majors. However as these systems evolve they include more and more topics that are of fundamental interest to IT majors. Some key areas include networking, security and human-computer interaction. They are also evolving into large, heterogeneous distributed systems requiring significant integrative design skills to implement successfully; integration is another key area of interest to IT designers. In addition to including multiple aspects of interest to IT, CPS is rapidly growing to take ever-larger portions of the overall computing market. A new combined class and lab experience has been designed for first-year IT students to introduce them to CPS concepts, with an emphasis on IT aspects of the field. This combined experience is taught as a single module, in a few hours, within a first year IT course. Two ideas were addressed by the experience. Firstly that CPS systems differ significantly from conventional computer systems and secondly that there are important design issues relating these systems to core IT topics. Lists of CPS concepts were developed and a subset of the concepts was included in the paired class-And-lab experience for the students. The lab experience uses a microcontroller system that interacts with the real world using analog and digital sensors and then communicates to the Internet through a webpage. The simple webpage is hosted by a webserver on the microcontroller, which illustrates both the capability and the limitations of a typical CPS system. Thus the students experience several aspects of CPS and are encouraged to develop cognitive relationships between CPS and IT. Details of the lab design are included in the paper. Pre- And post-Assessment tests were carried out to evaluate the degree of student understanding of the lab concepts and their relationship between IT and CPS. Proposals and justification for including CPS as part of an IT curriculum are presented. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2013.