Teaching Embedded Systems for Energy Harvesting Applications: A Comparison of Teaching Methods Adopted in UESTC and KTH

Further to China’s plan that was introduced in 2017 for attracting more students into engineering, many Chinese universities have started to explore new teaching methods that can be adopted into their programs. This shift was geared towards developing student-centred teaching materials rather than traditional teacher centred instruction. In this manuscript, we compare two different methods of instruction for a course on energy harvesting using embedded systems. We describe the learning materials and showcase the impact that project-based learning has had on a cohort of Chinese students that were enrolled in a joint master’s program between the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China (UESTC) and the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH). KTH has made remarkable progress in the teaching of embedded systems technology for energy harvesting applications, with great emphasis on active as well as collaborative learning. We demonstrate two examples of projects that Chinese students have completed in KTH and present evaluative data regarding their experiences. Our results show that KTH’s approach in teaching this module has had a positive impact on student learning, with an average of 80% of students think that teaching in KTH is conducive to students’ independent exploration.