Integration of ICT and unconventional teaching approaches into the digital systems design education towards its efficiency enhancement

Digital systems have become increasingly common in recent years. This fact accompanied by ever growing complexity of contemporary digital systems puts the new and stringent requirements on the education in this field. In order to be able to keep pace with technological innovations and changes, the future digital designers not only have to be skillful in the practical use of EDA (Electronic Design Automation) techniques but, at the same time, they have to possess solid foundations in the form of detailed knowledge and understanding of logic design basic issues. Unconventional teaching approaches and techniques are therefore required, especially in introductory courses, to make the courses´ content more accessible and visible to students, and to speed up the experiments with their designs. Specially developed new intuitive tools for circuit simulation and visualization have proved their advantage in hands-on labs, allowing at the same time to ease and speed up the process of students´ practical skills testing and assessing. On the other hand, the original interactive presentation tools enable to implement the new ways of content presentation based on the active learning techniques. In this contribution the research outcomes, experience with the developed and available teaching tools in the digital systems design field will be presented.