Using asterisk as a tool for teaching telephony subject for telecommunication classes

This paper presents the use of Asterisk software for teaching telephony in Electrical Engineering and Systems of Telecommunications undergraduate courses at the Federal Institute of Education, Science and Technology of Paraíba, João Pessoa, Paraíba, Brazil. To do this, and to reproduce confidently a real world scenario, the Asterisk software was chosen because it is an open and flexible source, and free of charge for academic use. One complex scenario was proposed to the students develop in several steps, where in each one a problem was presented to them and asked to solve it. At the end, the whole scenario was built by the students. The approach was validated during three academic semesters, during the years of 2012 and 2013. The empirical results show a meaningfully improvement in the final general mean of the group´s grades and reduction of school dropout.