scholarly journals Teaching Embedded System Design

Author(s):  
Ken Ferens

For the first time in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Manitoba, a 100% hands-on course was implemented in the winter term of the 2011/2012 year. This course ECE 3730 Embedded System Design was introduced into the curriculum and designed specifically to correct an imbalance between computer and electrical engineering student pre-requisites; to address students studying only for the exam problem; and to directly assess student performance particularly in the CEAB attributes of Design, Investigation, Problem Analysis, and Tools.

Author(s):  
Ken Ferens

This paper reports on a project based learning approach taken to teach the ECE 3740 Systems Engineering Principles and ECE 3730 Principles ofEmbedded Systems Design courses at the University of Manitoba. These courses were 100% hands-on, and each student was given development hardware and software in a lunch box to take home and work on projects throughout the course. Industry representative projects were chosen based on the author’s 5 years of experience working in the embedded systems industry. The courses were given in a company-like setting, where the lectures and laboratories were organized as product requirements gathering and analysis, design modeling and review, test plan and procedures, engineering change request and management, documentation, and product deployment meetings and events. The test and final exam were performed by students in the laboratory; they brought their embedded systems hardware in the lunch box,solved the given hands-on problems of the test/exam, and demonstrated their solutions, in real-time. This novel methodology allowed the examiner to directly assess student performance in the CEAB attributes of Design, Analysis, Investigation, and Tools, because their designsand solutions were actually demonstrated in actual hardware and software, not just on paper, like the conventional assessment approach for tests and exams.


Author(s):  
Dario Schor ◽  
Kathryn Marcynuk ◽  
Matthew Sebastian ◽  
Witold Kinsner ◽  
Ken Ferens ◽  
...  

The evolution of a curriculum involves changes at many different levels such as daily changes to reflect questions or areas of interest of a particular class, improvements to an established course based on observations from the professor, or more significant changes to streams of courses at a departmental level, or adaptation to suggested accreditation guidelines such the recent new Canadian Engineering Accreditation Board (CEAB) graduate attributes and outcomes. Most educational institutions have means of collecting data and assessing individual courses or streams of courses based on student performance, course evaluations, and professor assessments. However, since more can be done to gauge the collective effect of changes before students get to their final year capstone project or go into industry, a student-run curriculum forum has been established.This paper presents some of the lessons learned from the bi-annual student-run curriculum forums in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Manitoba. Based on the experience acquired so far, this paper outlines the organization of the curriculum forums, suggestions on guided discussions, ways to present feedback, and means of communicating to students how their feedback is being used to improve the curriculum.


Author(s):  
Umair Riaz ◽  
Sumair Aziz ◽  
Muhammad Umar Khan ◽  
Syed Azhar Ali Zaidi ◽  
Muhammad Ukasha ◽  
...  

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