
Electronics Education in the context of Sustainability |
Higher education in general, and particularly in the electronics case, is at present in a very different position than several years ago. In the past, technology aimed to improve living conditions, in a way reasonably independently from their sustainability. These developments have had strong environmental implications, and it is now referred not to Development per se, but Sustainable Development. The design of functional units (e.g. cars, houses, factories) is no longer done in independent layers but in integrated and multidisciplinary projects. After fully exploring purely passive solutions, we need to move towards active solutions. Systems that traditionally working only in open loop (e.g., lighting) should now works in closed loop. Indeed, systems that are more sustainable have this behavior as a result of the massive introduction of electronics and information technologies. Thus, electronics is now seen not only as a means of increasing our comfort but as an unavoidable ally for Sustainable Development. The speech seeks to contextualize the importance of teaching electronics and presents some results from teaching experience. |
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Teaching and Learning Electronics with Remote Labs |
Remote experimentation fits into the Technology-Enhanced Learning (TEL) domain and thus is usually applied at Educational Institutions. This keynote will first explain what is (not) a remote laboratory and the implications that follow from this debate. After classifying the different types of remote experiments, their usage inside the classroom will be described in detail, in particular in the areas of electronics, control, and telecommunications, in Engineering Education. The main purpose is to explain how remote experiments fit into a lesson plan and the educational impact they have into the students’ learning process.The presented examples will also demonstrate how to design a remote lab for experiments with electronics, i.e. the sort of equipment and architectures they require for being implemented. The keynote will end with a general overview of on-going projects in the field, the current and antecipated trends of remote experimentation, and the research groups currently active in this area. 2020 is the 25th anniversary of the coining of the “remote experimentation” expression, and as such a good opportunity to revisit the path done so far. |
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Approaching Field Programmable Gate Arrays with Deeds |
Our experience in teaching a first year course of digital design shows that the introduction of Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA) is advisable. Students demonstrate a better interest for the topics, if they can really verify the circuits they study and design. Traditional bread-board based prototyping is therefore replaced by FPGA programming, which is nowadays performed at professional level using Hardware Description Language (HDL). We are somehow critical of the current trend of introducing digital system with HDL. Our tool, Deeds (Digital Electronics Education and Design Suite) allows to configure FPGA boards for testing starting with traditional schematics-based entry, which is more compatible with the beginners’ skills, and overcomes the pre-requisite of some proficiency in high-level programming languages. Deeds integrates FPGA configuration and testing into its design and simulation flow, making digital design, including microprocessor programming, demonstrable through a few commercially available FPGA boards. Tutorials and projects, designed for flexibility and self-learning, open up many possibilities to hands-on experiments and introduce the basic skills on which building HDL competences later on. Deeds was developed at DITEN, University of Genoa, and it is composed of a set of simulators and a wide collection of associated learning material, covering combinational and sequential logic networks, finite state machine design, microcomputer interfacing and programming. Deeds website: https://www.digitalelectronicsdeeds.com/index.html |
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