Hands-on teaching with microcontrollers

Teaching electronics can be fun and motivating when you give the students the freedom to develop their own projects but of course, with a proper supervision. This work presents a case study where the teaching of microcontrollers in the third course of the MSc in Industrial Engineering, specialty in electronics, has been moved away from a strictly academic point of view towards a project-based learning (PBL) course. Here, the students are supposed to acquire a basic microcontroller knowledge in a few lecture sessions and autonomous work in order to pass rapidly to the hands-on training and activities and the following autonomously developed project. Proposed approach has enabled to increase the student engagement and motivation during the whole semester as well as improve the student average results compared to previous cases. Moreover, the satisfaction of the students and the word of mouth from student to student has permitted to increase the number of students of the specialty of electronics in the MSc in Industrial year after year. Students' outcomes and satisfaction surveys have been analysed for seven consecutive courses.