Virtualization of Digital Electronics Devices using Arduino for STEM Electronic & Mobile Learning

STEM technical courses, digital electronics included, have always been taught using very expensive equipment. This equipment, which is not industry portable, is usually stationed in a particular lab setup in the university with students accessing it physically in groups. This paper discusses the use of Arduino the physical device and its emulator, available online as an E-kit, to implement digital electronics devices virtually. This is a simple and inexpensive kit used to undertake practicals in the fields of engineering, science and technology for a number of courses including digital electronics for online and mobile learning. The study involved the development of gates, combinational logic circuits and sequential logic circuits in virtual form and their implementation done using Tinkercad circuits which is available free online as well as the physical Arduino by using the equivalent program codes. For full implementation, a laptop or a smartphone are also required. These implementations were done and effectively worked resulting to drastic cost reduction and increased portability. This is because one does not require to buy the devices which are instead implemented within Arduino virtually.