The Impact of Incorporating Hands-on Raspberry Pi Projects with Undergraduate Education in Boosting Students’ Interest in Scientific/Engineering Majors and Encouraging Women and Minorities to Advance their Integration in Practical Fields

Abstract

By design, the computer science curriculum for undergraduate students in the United States does not include enough hands-on courses such as microcontrollers and embedded systems. It is difficult for students, especially the Distance Learners (DL) to appreciate the power of computer science as a problem-solving field without real-world experiments. Furthermore, students in computer science may drop-out or turn away from the field because it does not offer an opportunity for them to communicate with each other during online/traditional labs. In this paper, an active learning project-based approach in online/traditional computer science courses is introduced to make the courses' material more attractive to students from minorities. Students obtain a deeper knowledge through active exploration of real-world problems. Students will enjoy the challenges they face when developing solutions. This paper studies the impact of hands-on project-based learning using Raspberry Pi on students taking online and face-to-face computer science courses at Old Dominion University.