Microcontroller-based learning kit: Course design using constructive alignment principles

Microcontroller based system course became an essential course in the engineering and industrial colleges. Such courses are usually attended by a wide range of students who came not only from different background but also with different programming skills. The challenge in teaching such a course is that, in one hand the course should meet the latest technology, while on the other hand the course should be interesting and attractive for all students with different characteristics and study skills. For that reason, a well designed course, and selecting the appropriate microcontroller kit to teach such courses are very critical. In this paper, we present a course design approach and our new designed microcontroller kit which can be used in teaching such a course. To help students deepen their knowledge using a learning by doing approach, the designed kit comprises a dsPIC microcontroller based main board and many E-blocks. Those E-blocks can be easily connected to the main board to form different microcontroller based systems. In order to minimize students “fears” of low level programming, the kit can be programmed using flow code software which is a graphical programming tool that allows those with little or no programming experience to develop complex electronic systems quickly. The kit also can be programmed using high level C language for those who have reasonable experience and programming skills and wish to do so. The intended outcome is to help students not only to learn how to program the microcontroller to execute certain tasks but also to deepen their learning and sharpen their software and hardware engineering skills by assembling different Eblocks with the main board to form a complete microcontroller based system.