Promoting student autonomy in the electronic design course

The focus of this paper is the description and analysis of the elements and methodologies employed to encourage students to be active participants in their learning on electronic design and integrated systems. A first proposal has been introduced in the Electronic Design Course from a one-year Master degree. Students that enroll this Master program come from different degrees (Physics, Telecommunications and Industrial Engineering, mainly), presenting a wide diversity in previous knowledge and motivation. We have implemented a teaching methodology that faces these differences and try to promote autonomous learning, creativity, independent thought, critical thinking and the ability to solve hardware design problems. On one hand, a strategy towards small projects and training exercises, dealing each one with a learning objective of the course, has been proposed. In every lesson students have to pick up a topic for a small individual research project that have to introduce later to the other class mates. On the other hand, a large HDL design project is proposed in the laboratory, to be solved individually. Results indicate an increase in the student motivation and comprehension of electronic design, becoming less supervisor-dependent.