Some aspects of student teamwork on practical assignments for complex control and measurement systems

Students of the first year of master program "Electronic and Computer Engineering" of the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing of Zagreb University are challenged to leverage their theoretical knowledge with real-life assignments they are likely to be involved with after the graduation. "Smart home" was chosen as the complex joint project for a group of 20 students. Every student had his/her own individual subproject for which he/she defined project requirements and acceptance protocol herself. The challenge was to master practical aspects of the teamwork and to adjust individual project requirements as well as acceptance protocols in order to achieve interoperability of subsystems and final functionality of the system as a whole. Especially challenging for teachers was segmentation of the target system and student's assignments in order to avoid that subsystems and their authors who performed well be penalized or blocked by those who did not perform their best or at all. On the technical level the challenge was to choose microcontroller platform suitable for various subsystems with wide range of tasks and to choose protocols to interconnect subsystems.