Revision of a microcontroller course for a mixed student body

A microcontroller course has been offered at Southeast Missouri State University for a long time. Students enrolled in this course are mainly juniors and seniors from engineering physics and computer science majors. Both student groups have diverse background knowledge coming into this course. This paper describes the revision of the microcontroller course that we started in 2006. We set three objectives for the revised course. First, we want our students to be able to program in both assembly and C languages and understand the impact of computer hardware on software programming. Second, we aim to teach the course in a realistic, real-world-oriented fashion so that the students have a basic understanding of various constraints in embedded systems. Our third objective is to use the microcontrollers as a means to integrate the curriculum so that our students gain a comprehensive view of various topics they have learned in their previous years. The new course blends the lectures and the labs together, and emphasizes hands-on, active learning with labs and projects. The revised course has been successful with good student evaluations and increased class enrollment.