Teaching strategies for undergraduate laboratories with students having heterogeneous prior knowledge

We are presenting strategies for an undergraduate practical hardware laboratory for computer science students. They have a very heterogeneous prior knowledge. Based on a traditionally organized hardware lab we have developed a set of new strategies that all together help to overcome the known problems, in particular those stemming from the heterogeneous prior knowledge. We will describe the concept, including the preparatory work, the organization of the lab experiments themselves and the post processing of our lab experiments. Finally, we will summarize the experience gained.