Teaching Cyber Physical System Co-design: IoT on an FPGA Approach

With the advent of smart cities and complex biomedical devices, Cyber Physical Systems (CPS) expands at an increasing rate and grows ever more important. With this movement, Electrical and Computer Engineering course curriculum plays a vital role in preparing future engineers to tackle the unique problems in CPS in many disciplines. Teaching embedded system programming and its application to CPS to ECE undergraduates is challenging due to the limitation of current hardware oriented courses. This paper involves hardware/software co-design concepts, interfaces with physical systems including sensors and actuators, and cyber systems developments. We believe that the only way this CPS skill is developed - review source code, programming Internet-of-Things (IoT) components or solving design problems - is through active learning practices. Our experience showed that this happens in homework assignments in current setting. We tried to use the part of class or lab time to give students guided practice based on active learning. Laboratory exercises, individual exercises, small-group exercises and Think-pair-share materials have been developed for the active learning approach.