Affordable, easy-to-use robotic arm used in hardware description languages teaching

Practical activities are critical teaching mechanisms since they enable the acquisition of professional competences while involving and motivating the students. Thus, it is necessary to organize realistic and sufficiently complex activities that, at the same time, can be easily understood and correctly performed by the students. In this context the disposal of physical systems that enables students to interact with the real world are very interesting. However, limitations in the cost and complexity of the systems can present problems. To overcome these limitations, the paper presents an affordable robotic arm that has been used to support the teaching of VHDL language to students of the second-year Telecommunications degree. As a result, students have been able to design, simulate and implement different components creating a final, real system with a motivating practical result.