A flash-based multimedia interactive tutoring system for distance education of biomedical engineering students: new approach to teaching microcontroller-based systems

In this paper, we present new tutoring system teaching biomedical engineering students the basic concept of internal and external operations of a microcontroller, which is necessary to understand modern microcontroller-based biomedical equipment. The developed tutoring system utilized multimedia contents and maximized the interaction with students for distance education. It also provides movie clips, graphic animations, narrations as well as graphic and text. Movie clips were produced by using WinCam and graphic animations were implemented by using FLASH MX and ActionScript, GIF graphic files and Power Point techniques. This tutoring system includes the basic concept of microcontroller-based system, entire execution process for the each instruction of the instruction set, development of small-sized programs, understanding of operations, control of built-in peripherals and design techniques of simple application programs.