Exploiting Arduino Features to Develop Programming Competencies

Developing programming competencies is essential for systems, information science, computer science, and electrical engineering students. Engineering students usually face the complexity of working with programming languages that demand compliance with syntactic and semantic rules, which typically represent a daunting task for novice students. Watching textual messages on the screen only, like the classic “hello world,” is no longer attractive in the current information society, a missing motivation and possible obstacle to developing programming competencies. Students would like to interact with hardware and appreciate environmental reactions. Arduino board permits developing solutions like that. This article presents the academic experience of first-year students of Ingeniería de Sistemas e Informática at the Universidad Continental (ISI-UC) of Huancayo, Perú, using the Arduino microcontroller board for the teaching-learning process to develop programming competencies. The results obtained show a positive impact regarding the experience of previous using traditional text-based programming languages. Using Arduino, students create digital circuits and computational electronics competencies, another significant benefit. This experience used an online simulator, and the results obtained permit us to plan future online education strategies for this major. The next step will be the application of Arduino and the online simulator to deepen programming skills, including recursivity, real-time constraints, multitasking features, data structure, data-oriented programming, and object-oriented programming. The primary limitations encountered in this experiment were the students’ lack of experience with electronics concepts to build circuits and, in some cases, the low internet speeds to assist in the programming process of online education. Realizing simulated experiences in classroom experiences was not a significant challenge for teachers and most students. However, problems could arise when students perform practical experiences using real Arduino boards in traditional classes for the availability requirement of Arduino and other electronic components.