VHDL Crash Course: A Multimedia-Based Teaching Approach

Gaining a solid understanding of hardware description is crucial for electrical engineering students, as it enables them to understand and design digital systems down to register transfer level. In this paper, we present a video-based VHDL crash course to support students in learning VHDL and its integration into the curriculum. The course design is based on a multimedia learning theory and has been carefully crafted to optimize the impact on student learning outcomes. Insights into our video recording setup emphasize the technical aspects that have contributed to the quality and effectiveness of the instructional videos, as confirmed by the students. Statistics obtained from student course evaluations also show that the VHDL crash course is a valuable addition to the curriculum and provides students with a comprehensive understanding of VHDL concepts. The videos in particular were found to be helpful by 95 % of the students, who used them either for repetition or as a first introduction to hardware description languages.