Challenging students software skills to learn hardware based courses

Abstract

This paper describes the evolution of a hardware course in a software oriented curriculum. It explains the problems that students taking this course experienced in the past. Furthermore, it presents the improvements to the course curriculum and proposes a new teaching methodology, as well as the results of its enforcement. All these changes lead to the overall improvement of the course quality: student satisfaction and interest, increased number of completed hardware projects and significant improvement in grade distribution.